Tuesday, September 20, 2005

WSJ Redesign

I recall a few years ago the Wall Street Journal changed its design. In fact the redesign consisted of two parts only, it used to be printed in black and white only, so in the new version they added color to its pages, and moreover, it used to never put pictures in the paper, and once in a while when they decide to put a picture of some kind they would have it sketched by a cartoonist working for the paper. In its new redesign format it started putting pictures taken by digital cameras, and other colored pictures, as opposed to the previous black and white pictures– before the redesigning. As an added bonus to their readers, they added what they termed a personal Journal, it is a pull out section consisting of about 12 to 16 pages tailored for personal issues as– life, health, entertainment, travel, personal finances, and all kinds of other personal matters. I think that adding color didn’t really make any difference to the newspaper, after all, a newspaper is meant to be read and then thrown away irrespective of its appearance, we simply don’t save our daily newspapers the way we save our pictures for example, we simply don’t have an album that would fit the pages of the newspaper. In any event the addition of personal journal was a novel idea, it was a breakthrough if you will, and the reason being no matter what your profession is you are bound to find something in the personal section that would touch upon some part that will affect your life, be that a car you want to buy, a house that you want to build, or a bank loan that you need to finance a project that you are working on, the personal journal would have the information necessary to help you make an informed decision. I personally have been reading the personal section on a daily basis without fail since its inception over two years ago. You can’t imagine the volume of knowledge that I have added to my brain repository since I commenced this endeavor.

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