Kasturi and Sons, publishers of The Hindu in English and Tamil, have relaunched their financial newspaper accompanied by a redesign. The new design of Business Line was unveiled on Thursday, 23 January 2014 as the paper celebrated its 20th year of publication with a general lightening up and better use of photos, graphics, and lighter coloured backgrounds for text boxes. Business Line has also decided to only publish on six days a week, eschewing its Sunday edition.
In fact, some of its regular Sunday columns discussing markets and pivotals have been moved to its Monday edition – renamed and reformatted with white space on the right and bullet points for each story. Sans serif type is liberally used on every page for the tables and graphics as well as a page-deep column with summaries and pointers. The stock market tables have also been redesigned with the entire design fitted into CCI Newsgate templates
and thus may require a bit of work and imagination to reflect the content driven demands of the business daily.
Business Line’s editor Mukund Padmanabhan wrote on the front page of the first issue of the relaunched paper, “The new look, created by one of the country’s finest designers,
Aurobind Patel, achieves the extremely difficult task of showcasing content without screaming or attention-grabbing gimmickry.
“Starting with the careful selection of fonts and the colour palette, attention has been paid to the smallest detail to give you a design that is exquisite in its simplicity and its elegance. The effort has been to resolve the traditional conflict between content and design by fusing them into an integrated and harmonious whole.”
Prior to lending his expert hands to the redesign of Business Line, Aurobind Patel had also designed the India Today and was design director of The Economist in London and also worked for The Times, London where he designed its typeface. Patel redesigned the venerable Mumbai based Economic & Political Weekly two years ago
