The Bombay Duck Press is the name and brand identity we created for the new indie imprint of the Tartan Turban Secret Readings, dedicated to publishing the massive catalogue of historic and brand-new South Asian literature yet to be published in Canada

The imprint’s primary audience is the South Asian community, followed by all lovers of great global literature. Well-read, well-educated and well-travelled, South Asians are Canada’s largest diaspora community and are fiercely proud of their 5,000-year-old culture.

We avoided the tropes and clichés of traditional South Asian design: Mughal ornament, British colonial throwbacks or Bollywood flasheroo. Instead, we gave it a name and brandmark that are quirky and modern, elements that instantly capture its South Asian heritage and appeal to the South Asian reader.

We named the new imprint The Bombay Duck Press—Bombay Duck for short. The Bombay Duck is not a duck. In fact, it’s not even a bird. It is a fish—Harpadon nehereus—a prized delicacy from India’s western coast on the Arabian Sea, where the cultural and commercial megalopolis that is Bombay (now Mumbai) glitters with promise and stories and songs and poetry.

The wordmark plays off this unique and unusual name, with bold pen-and-ink letterforms—a fishbone with the letters “Bombay Duck” forming the head, bones, fins and tail of a devoured Bombay Duck—a classic fishbone skeleton.

While instantly readable by all, for its South Asian audience, it is a taste of home, an inside joke that is immediately relatable and communicates its geographic origins in word and visual. Simultaneously, it is a riddle that invites non-South-Asian readers to solve it.