Relaunching Al Watan

I am now officially fluent in newspaper Arabic.  I can speak about columns, fonts, positioning, stories and bylines.  I know the word for ghost (because photo cut-outs shouldn’t float like them), and for gigantic (because headlines always needed to be bigger).  I even have a handle on the various hand gestures Arabic folk tend to pepper their conversation with. Its an eccentric vocabulary to be sure but its also the definition of useful.  Drop me into any Arabic newsroom in the world and I would be totally fine.  Just don’t ask me to order food or talk to a real person.

I learned my sprinkling of the language in the newsroom of Al Watan, the liberal-leaning national newspaper in Saudi Arabia and our first Arab language client.  Al Watan is 10 years old.  When it launched in Saudi, it changed the face of newspapers.  In the past 10 years, the other newspapers in the country haven’t so much evolved as copied the innovations of Al Watan.  The idea behind the current project was to push the Al Watan 10 years ahead of the pack.  Again.The overall project was split into two parts.  The first was technical and skills oriented.  Our friends at Human Capital (especially Tim Ewington and Zadok Prescott) and I spent more than two weeks helping with the transition from Quark to Indesign CS4 ME and training a large and relatively inexperienced design staff in both the new program and the basic design principles that underpin the basis of the new look (including the use of photography, color, structure, etc).  The second was about finally introducing that new look, nurtured for months and put through severe editorial scrutiny, focus groups and print tests, to the world.

It was a daunting learning curve, not only designing from right to left but basically relearning typography from scratch and coming to terms with not being able to speak or read the language.  This final limitation was probably the hardest for us, we Shakeup Medians pride ourselves on our literacy and special relationship with words.  After all, we are, all of us, readers and writers first (and by training) and designers second.

Still Ellen and I spent weeks learning about the vagaries of Arabic typography (with lots of help, thank you Nadine and many many others) and, after all that, decided we wanted nothing more than make our own.  So we did.  Or, more precisely, the wonderful and wonderfully talented Pascal Zhogobi, one of the most exciting young Arabic typographers working today, did, with only the slightest of direction from us.  The new font, Al Watan Headline is the core of the new design.

Like many of Pascal’s fonts, Al Watan Headline is inspired by old Arabic hot metal type workshops found in Lebanon and across the Arabic world.  Pascal’s genius is an ability to combine traditional forms with a modern and young flair.  Its like a hot pink bowler; classy and traditional but unmistakably modern.  We used the Linotype classic Yakout for body type and TheSansArab by Lucas Fonts for various secondary labelling.

We instituted a number of modern newspaper techniques, including a three layer headline system; colorful photo-based pull quotes; prominent sidebar and background boxes; color coded sections; a series of L-shaped front pages that allow loads of display space without interfering with the sanctity of the news area; larger, more dynamic, better cropped photographs; more vertical pages; spreads that don’t interfere with each other; better infographics;  and many many other things….

The biggest change, though, was the conversion of Al Watan from a paper that strived to be comprehensive above all else to an edited newspaper that strives to tell readers what is important and why. Of course much of the credit for this is should go to the editorial staff at Al Watan, particularly the Editor Jamal Khashoggi and his deputies plus the talented former BBC and Al Hayat journalist the paper brought in to help with the editorial side of the relaunch, Youssef Khazem.

The new paper is split in to two bodies.  News, Opinion and Sport in the first body with Business, Life and Culture in the second. See below for photos from the relaunch and some sample pages.

Add comment April 28th, 2009