Friday, April 10, 2009

The Kuwait School Manifesto in the Al-Watan Newspaper...


Yesterday's (Thursday's) Al-Watan newspaper, one of the country's leading English newspapers (affiliated with the Herald Tribune) had almost a full page article about the Kuwait School Manifesto, which is great, and we sincerely hope it will introduce some of the presented ideas to a wider audience. Whether it will catalyse a discussion regarding the related issues remains to be seen. Let's hope it will...

In regards to the article itself, if a bit of criticism is allowed, the piece would have benefited from including the headings of the eight maxims in the text. As it stands, the pacing of the text is quite difficult to decipher as the manifesto's eight maxims aren't partitioned form each other, resulting in the points being read as a continuous extended paragraph. The inclusion of the pictures from the presentation help with conveying the overall message, but as their locations within the piece aren't synchronized with the text, they end up adding to the confusion.
It brings to mind Kenya Hara's (the Japanese graphic designer's) dictum found in his book 'Designing Design' (2007), in which he informs us that, "verbalizing a design is another act of design" - the composition of the message is not complete until its reconfigured into its final format (in this instance the framework of the newspaper page). The layout and the pictorial structure of a written piece plays a fundamental part in how successfully it will communicate its intent.

Please click here for a link to the Al-Watan article.

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