Dubai: An Amazing Nation is a book that is unique among UAE books as a successful fusion of research and design in which both had an equal share in the creative process, said design director Miguel Angel Gomez.
Writer Iona Stanley and the designers of Gulf News worked together to grasp the concept of each spread, work out a sketch, find the facts and illustrative content, and get them to transform into tightly designed pages.
“This was a process wherein information and presentation came together to achieve the best results to tell a rich variety of stories,” said Gomez, who led a team of 14 graphic designers to craft the visually driven stories.
“Often, the writer dominates the process but this time it was different. We gave equal weightage to visuals and text, and we believe this is the first time a whole book on the UAE has been completely told in graphics,” said Gomez.
The biggest challenge was to pick the right visual ways to illustrate the diverse topics, while also making sure that the final product remains easy to navigate, and offers enough details to draw in the reader. For example, the large four-page spread on Burj Khalifa is told with a 3-D graphic approach to allow the image of the tower to dominate, but also incorporate cut-aways to show readers the details of engineering in the tallest tower in the world.
The spread on the Gulf’s traditional pearl diving activity also required a different treatment. Since there are no underwater pictures of pearl divers in action, a different artist painted a watercolour of a pearl diver heading for the seabed, supported by information.
Another story on how the UAE’s population is likely to grow by 2030 needed yet another technique. A series of graphic images and tables clarified the mass of numbers that show how the UAE national population will grow, how the numbers of expatriates will change, how education will spread, and how more expatriates are expected to learn Arabic, among many other trends.
“One of the joys of the book is the variety of visual story-telling techniques that uphold the purpose of book — to tell the UAE’s story and make it accessible to all.”
