The efficiency of a solar can be limited by reflection through both the front gridlinesand non-gridline regions. In the later, poor texturing, non-optimum thickness and refractive index of the antireflection coating (ARC), could be responsible, while wide front gridlines impacts the former. By utilizing an optimized ARC on a properly textured absorbing surface, then the implementation of a narrow gridline design can curtail this unwanted optical and electrical losses. However, the implementation of narrow screen-printed gridlines is daunting, because the metal powder particle size in commercial silver paste, dictates the mesh threshold, which places an upper limit on what gridline width can be printed. Thus, an innovative "tapered finger design", where the front gridline gradually reduces in width through three stages and in turn leads to an overall low silver consumption. It is imperative that the innovative design overcomes the associated gridline and contact resistances and show an overall superior or at par performance to the conventional design. Thus, the solar cell electrical output parameters including, the fill factor, open circuit voltage, reverse saturation current and efficiency should attest to this fact. This thesis therefore, focused on the design, modeling and fabrication of com- mercial size solar cells G1 CZ wafers (158mmx158mm, which was supplied from the production line after the ARC). Three front grid designs were made and converted to the printing screens (masks) including (i) a traditional front grid design with 40 μm opening, (ii) the tapered finger design (50, 40, and 30 μm opening), and (iii) the tapered finger design (50, 40, and 30 μm opening) with the addition of streets (1 mm wide). The experimental results (for the best cells), showed (i) 81.1% fill factor and 22.6% efficiency for the 40 μm opening; (ii) 79.0% fill factor and 22.0% efficiency for the (50, 40, and 30 μm opening), and (iii) 79.2% fill factor and 21.9% efficiency for the (50, 40, and 30 μm opening with 1 mm-street width). The slight loss in performance for the innovative design could be attributed to non-optimum printing, which would require much fine tuning in particular, the squeegee pressure, the print-speed and snap-off distance to account for the difference in the design. It should be noted though that, although the 40 μm traditional gridline gave the best results, the tapered gridline with 1-mm street width is superior in the use of silver consumption by 12.5 mg. Such reduction in silver consumption would amount to a $2M savings if this design is implemented in a Gigawatt factory. As the PV industry is working to standardize the wafer size to G12 (210mmx210mm area) , this prompted the extension of this thesis work to include this upcoming commercial wafer size. Since the innovative design with the streets reduces the silver consumption, this design was assumed for the G12 wafer size. As at the time of this work, the G12 wafers were not available for experimental validation, thus only simulation and extrapolation of the G1 experimental results are presented here. From G1 result the silver consumption was the major advantage of the innovative design, which trend was also true for G12, showing a 59.8 mg reduction in silver consumption compared to the conventional design. This reduction in silver consumption translates to $7M savings in a Gigawatt factory, which is very significant. Thus, the innovative design would lead to solar electricity affordability and lower LCOE.