Global Creative Director of Arab News Simon Khalil talks exclusively to tksajeev about his design concept and the future of design during this pandemic era
How many design awards Arab News had received for the year 2020?
Arab News has won over 20 design awards in 2020. These are in competitions such as SPD – Society of Publication Designers, SND – Society for News Design, European Newspaper Awards, Indigo Design Awards and of course, The Asian Newspaper Awards. We collaborate with some amazingly talented artists from around the world which helps us in our ambitions to deliver world class projects. These awards reinforce our creative vision at Arab News and push the design team to produce bigger and better creative work for our readers globally.
What is Arab News’s philosophy of design?
Arab News’s design tries to reflect its print legacy, while projecting modernity and change. Although the design is modern, there is a clear connect to its Arab roots, which is represented through the flow of the Arabic script in subdeck styles and kickers. Our main font is Austin, a modern, didone typeface, which provides elegance and a sense of ‘old school’ journalism and credibility to the design. The sans font is Isento, a new sans serif in the grotesque tradition, created by acclaimed type designer Dino dos Santos which gives us contemporaneity and accessibility. At the core of all these design elements is ‘centrality’ – one of the pillars of design. This centrality is reflected in every page where all content and imagery revolve around the center axis. As the voice of a changing region, Arab News is not only at the center of this change but must also exude that change. We commission a large volume of illustration at Arab News and believe this is a great way to visualize content. It has allowed us to collaborate with some of the world’s biggest and best known artists. We have a minimalist and modern graphics style which allows us to display large amounts of data clearly and also easy cross over from print to digital.
Tell us about the structure of your design department ?
We have a core creative team of 3 senior designers, including myself, who work on special projects and large digital projects based in Dubai. We have a newspaper designer and graphic artist also based in Dubai working on edition. There is a production hub of 4 print layout designers in Jeddah, KSA.
Do you work on a template or you treat every story separately?
30% of the newspaper is templated. We use our resources to make sure the show pages are designed as creatively as they can be, these include Features, Business and main news pages. The templates are functional and in sections such as Opinion. On templated pages we still follow core design values such as good photo selection and use of photography, hierarchy and typography. Just because it is a template it should not be seen as a substandard page for our readers.
Did you focus on print and digital similar?
We are digital first, so all our content has to be designed with that in mind. Designers are expected to deliver digital versions of their print designs for use on the website and across social. These include simple animated GIFs and graphics.
We also have podcasts and a TV talk show which all need assets designed. The designers have to think digitally and also understand how all these platforms work without letting the quality of our print product slide. It is a lot to juggle but certainly makes the job exciting.
Do you think good design can help newspaper grow? If so how?
Definitely! Great design gets noticed. Great design engages with new audiences and can help any brand to grow. Innovation is key to this and with audiences having access to multiple sources of information, news design must push boundaries. Special reports, special editions and investigations all help news brands to get noticed. I believe experimenting with mixed reality will also be key to the future growth of any news brands.
Some of the award winning pages of Arab News
Arab News had won 9 award of excellence in the SND 42 competition. But no medals.Do you think SND judging is too American focused and the selection of the judges should be restructured. This time there were 28 judges. In which 23 were from United States
No not at all. I was a judge in this year’s competition in the World’s Best Newspaper category. Two newspapers won this prestigious award, Weekendavisen from Denmark and de Volkskrant from Netherlands beating American publications. All entries are judged without bias and purely on design and editorial excellence. Maybe we all need to up our game! Or at least take inspiration from the medal winners and find ways of being more creative. Every time I see an edition of the NYT Kids section, I wish I could work on it. Consistently an amazing body of work and something I personally want to aspire to as a designer.
Tell us about yourself
Newspapers have always been a big part of my life. As a kid, I spent weekends looking through the papers over breakfast with my parents. I would doodle sketches around the images and the portraits in the supplements and turn them into different scenes –– which always made it very difficult for my parents to read the papers (laughs). But, to me, it was a way of enhancing what I was seeing visually.
I’ve always been fascinated and excited about the relationship between powerful words and powerful visuals. I actually studied creative advertising and worked first as a copywriter at an advertising agency after I graduated. But newspapers became an interesting choice for me to go down a slightly different path. I joined a weekly newspaper, called the Brecon & Radnor Express, as Assistant Editor which was a baptism by fire. I didn’t have any newspaper experience at all, but it was a great way to learn the whole newspaper trade, from writing, subbing, editing, printing, sales and of course design. I created several supplements and a magazine whilst I was in that role.
I then went on to design at The Telegraph where I was Art Director of The Daily and The Sunday Telegraph for many years. I joined Arab News three years ago to implement an ambitious digital and print redesign and relaunch. Arab News now has editions in Japanese and French as well as English.
You know, for me, how exciting is this job that we do? As newspaper designers, we engage with hundreds of thousands of people every single day globally. I think it’s just such a great business to be in, to be able to tell stories. Humans have been telling stories for thousands of years, and we get the opportunity to enhance those stories for readers but also make them easier to understand. That’s the key, isn’t it? If you have something very complicated, or something that has a lot of different opinions in it, we design and present this in an easy to understand and engaging way for our readers to form their own opinions, which is so important.
What is the future of design ?
There is no doubt that the global pandemic has been incredibly challenging for the whole industry. Perhaps we have come to see the role of the printed newspaper as a message in a bottle, from one set of isolated people to another. The intimate, tactile and finite qualities of printed publications help us to connect, to think and to understand the avalanche of online news.
