The Art of Looking Sideways: 0000 - Hardcover

Fletcher, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714834491 ISBN 13: 9780714834498

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 2001

Synopsis

The Art of Looking Sideways is a primer in visual intelligence, an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, colour and imagery.

This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, colour, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.

The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.

About this title

Review:

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 hand bag, Buzz Aldrin's bootprint 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, colour 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

Review:

"Nobody should enter the real world until they have read and been graphically stimulated by Alan Fletcher's amazing Baedeker of practical and erudite information. The book could have been described by René Magritte - 'A truly poetic canvas is an awakened dream'. I'm sure Alan's magnum opus will awaken many dreams'."―Terence Conran

"This is a cornucopia of a book, a lucky dip of perception and paradox, laced with more strange facts than can possibly be probable and providing more fun than one has any right to expect."―Bamber Gascoigne, author and broadcaster

"A brilliant trick and treat. Fletcher's ideas pretend to have been gathered in from anywhere, but here is a very rigorous creative mind at work. Alan Fletcher is the great visual thinker of our age."―Fiona MacCarthy, Biographer and Cultural Historian

"t last, Alan Fletcher proves that graphic designers can be as fascinated about what things mean, as by how they look. This book is a staggeringly rich collection of words and pictures that will change the way you see the world."―Deyan Sudjic, Author and Critic and editor of Domus magazine

"This remarkable magpie hoard of words and pictures forces one to reconsider the relationship between thinking and looking, telling and showing. And as one had every reason to expect, Fletcher's own drawings and graphics are delightful."―Jonathan Miller, Theatre Director and Author

"A rather special collection... Will go down just as well with your Auntie Mavies as with your lawyer, bin man and coolest friends."―Homes & Interiors

"The design book of the century may have already been written."―Design Week

"Alan Fletcher's book challenges both dogma and habit by questioning how we see things, how we read things and how we understand things."―Royal College of Art, London

"...This book will delight anyone who enjoys unexpected visual and verbal play, cultural and historical observations and insights, and staggering amounts of trivia and anecdotes."―Library Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Phaidon Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0714834491
• ISBN 13: 9780714834498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1068