The Hinglish Project is an interesting initiative by India's Ministry of Tourism that aims to promote the Hindi alphabet in a novelty form. They've created Hinglish, a customized typeface that overlaps characters from the Latin alphabet with their phonetic equivalent character in Hindi. Despite being different script structures, both alphabets converge in this typeface by their sounds instead of by their character- this means, this font won't allow us to learn how to read in Hindi, but it will help us become familiar with their scripture from a phonetic perspective.
The font itself is based on a sans-serif rounded type, a style that fits both the structure of the characters of the Devangari script (which is the one used for written Hindi) and the Latin alphabet. The construction of each character plays with the yuxtaposition of them both, adjusting them to a shared geometry. The newly merged letters are presented in two different tones, as a way to separate both readings without breaking them apart. All the letters are in lowercase since there is no case distinction in Hindi, which makes the complete set look like a collection of weird looking glyphs. It's definitely a very cool project that produces interesting results with type experimentation. You can download the font here.
