In less than five decades, the UAE’s transformation has been nothing short of remarkable.

In recognition of the nation’s achievements, Al Nisr Publishing produced a title to capture the country’s confident and forward-thinking character as well as its rich cultural heritage.

The book, An Amazing Nation, breaks new ground in UAE publishing with its detailed illustrations and infographics, offering readers a visual encyclopaedia of the country in 117 pages

And this is the very reason it was singled out by the Society for News Design for a silver medal, which was announced on March 8.

 

The SND is an international non-profit body for news media that picks its winners from the very best worldwide.

An Amazing Nation has more than 40 double-page spreads filled with highly informative vignettes and varying forms of visual illustrations, photographs and multi-dimensional renderings.

“The book tells the story of a country and its people who are looking confidently to their future while remaining firmly rooted in their unique Arab heritage, while taking pride in the UAE’s global citizenship and remaining completely at ease with their Gulf traditions,” says editor, Francis Matthew.

An important part of the success of An Amazing Nation is its fusion of research and design in which both had an equal share in the creative process right from the start of the planning.

“Often the writer dominates the process but this time it was different. We gave equal relevance to the visuals as well as to the text, and we believe this is the first time a whole book on the UAE has been completely told in graphics,” said design director Miguel Angel Gomez.

The biggest challenge was to come up with the right visual ways to illustrate the very different topics, while also making sure that the final product remains easy to navigate, and detailed enough to intrigue the reader.

A large four-page spread on Burj Khalifa is told with a 3-D graphic to allow the image of the tower to dominate, with the graphic artist using cut-aways, to illustrate the details of the engineering achievements in the tallest tower in the world.

The spread on the Gulf’s traditional pearl diving required very different treatment.

There are no underwater pictures of pearl divers in action so a different artist painted a watercolour of a pearl diver heading for the seabed, and made sure that the illustration included all the relevant pieces of information.

Visual story-telling 

Since its launch in December 2017, this unique infographic book has been both a commercial and critical success, winning a silver medal from the Society of Newspaper Design in 2017, in recognition of its standards of design and storytelling.

Commenting on its success, the Francis Matthew said: “We find everyone likes it for its accessibility and those who know the country well enjoy the depth of the research. This is one reason that companies and government departments have bought in bulk to inform their employees and visitors and use as a corporate gift.”

Looking ahead to how the UAE’s population is likely to grow by the year 2030 needed yet another approach.

A series of graphic images and tables illustrate 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 as the country develops and evolves further

source : gulfnews