Friday 2 December 2011

The Art of Looking Sideways

When I walked into first class of my Masters in Visual Communication I was little nervous. All our tutors were standing in front of us and they asked us a lot of questions and one of them was if we had read the book the Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher. I was making quick notes so that I could review it again later. I had underlined the statement as it had caught my interest.




Reading, Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways is an absolutely extraordinary and inexhaustible "guide to visual awareness," a virtuallyindescribable 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," anda dizzying array of quotations and snippets of information, including the wisewords of Marcus Aurelius, Stephen Jay, and Gandhi's comment, "Westerncivilization? I think it would be a good idea." Fletcher's mastery of designmixes 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.


Recommended book get easily from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Looking-Sideways-Alan-Fletcher/dp/0714834491/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336336521&sr=8-1-fkmr0

London