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Loading... The Art of Looking Sidewaysby Alan Fletcher
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This is one of my favorite books but it's very hard to describe. Overall, it's about design, but it's also equal parts biography, philosophy, and quote book. If you love design and pick it up, you'll have a hard time putting it back down again. This is simply an astonishing book that I suggest you should savour. In a sense I feel that there is little more to say than to advise you to obtain a copy. This may not feel like much of a review, and for the left brained reader requiring logic with which to justify their purchase, I will try to oblige, superfluous though this feels. This is a large book with over 500 large format pages. It is described by Alan Fletcher as the work of a visual Jackdaw to produce an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. As he describes ‘The book attempts to open windows to glimpse views rather than dissect the pictures on the wall. To look at things from unlikely angles.... The book has no thesis, is neither a whodunit or a how-to-do-it, has no beginning middle or end. It’s a journey without a destination.... It is unlike most books, those that are concerned with the mechanics rather than the thoughts, with the match rather than the fire.’ The result is not a book to sit down and read sequentially from cover to cover, rather an environment of ideas and stimuli through which to journey, an exploration in which to become immersed. Reading through reviews of the book on Amazon, all seem to come from graphic designers, indeed the author is a renown graphic designer himself. The result is a book that is a delight to hold. The different paper types and textures, intriguing layouts and inviting formats mean that every page turned leads to new discoveries even before their content is examined. Its merits as an exemplar of the art of design are clear, but this is much more than a role model for designers. It is a book that in infinite ways serves as a catalyst for thinking. It has a multifaceted ability to present aspects of the world in new ways, that defy you seeing them the way you always have in the past. Through the imaginative use of images and text, quotations, snippets of information, and a host of other approaches, this is a feast for the mind as well as the eye. It’s not simply a book that I can’t stop dipping into, I can’t stop smiling at the fact that Alan Fletcher took the time, care and attention to detail to share it with me. It is quite simply a pleasure to hold. If you obtain a copy I recommend a pack of post-it notes to catalogue the innumerable pages you will want to return to. This is a great and inspirational design book. It has some beautiful designs and interesting essays. It is something you can look at from time to time but not something you can sit down with for a long period. Something interesting on almost every page. And it's got lots of pages, too. no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0714834491, Hardcover)Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways is an absolutely extraordinary and inexhaustible "guide to visual awareness," a virtually indescribable concoction of anecdotes, quotes, images, and bizarre facts that offers a wonderfully twisted vision of the chaos of modern life. Fletcher is a renowned designer and art director, and the joy of The Art of Looking Sideways lies in its beautiful design. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters with titles like "Colour," "Noise," "Chance," "Camouflage," and "Handedness," Fletcher's book, which he describes as "a journey without a destination," is "a collection of shards" that captures the sensory overload of a world that simply contains too much information. In one typical section, entitled "Civilization," the reader encounters six Polish flags designed to represent the world, a photograph of an anthropomorphic handbag, Buzz Aldrin's boot print on the moon, drawings of Stone Age pebbles, a painting of "Ireland--as seen from Wales," and a dizzying array of quotations and snippets of information, including the wise words of Marcus Aurelius, Stephen Jay, and Gandhi's comment, "Western civilization? I think it would be a good idea." Fletcher's mastery of design mixes type, space, fonts, alphabets, color, and layout combined with a "jackdaw" eye for the strange and profound to produce a stunning book that cannot be read, but only experienced. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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This book has provided me with infinite moments, better said esthetic moments. It is the eyes that are working while we do not allow rationality to disturb a possible criative moment. Words are not enough.
A very important book in my shelves! (