I noticed something I thought a bit odd at a medical office today. It was a posted cluster of covid protective notices written in ten different languages, the first seven of which looked like this:
Directly below these seven were three more notices that looked like this:
What caught my eye was the notice on the far right which is written in Arabic and in which the illustration of an airplane traversing the world shows the aircraft traveling in the opposite direction from the other nine images.
By the way, please forgive the keystoning and the slightly tilted aspects of these images. I tried to hold the camera phone as steady as I could, but I'm not a tripod. The color differences I ascribe to the overhead fluorescent lighting.
The messages of the first nine notices read, so I believe, from left to right while the message of the tenth notice reads from right to left.. Proper placement of the Arabic text obviously called for the picture to be located to left of the posting's center line but if I'd been the graphic artist, I would have had the globe positioned a little more to the left and the airplane facing in the same direction as all the others.
Does any of this matter in terms of the important message? No.
Did I find it a little bit jarring? Yes.
There's no good reason for that, of course, but maybe it holds a brief lesson in graphic design.
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