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Books : The Art of Looking Sideways

by: Alan Fletcher


Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 700 EAN: 9780714834498 ISBN: 0714834491 Label: Phaidon Press Ltd Manufacturer: Phaidon Press Ltd Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 534 Publication Date: June 30, 2001 Publisher: Phaidon Press Ltd Sales Rank: 1591 Studio: Phaidon Press Ltd	Average Rating: List Price: £24.95 Amazon.co.uk's Price: £17.47 You Save: £7.48 (30%) Prices subject to change.
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Editorial Review:

Amazon.co.uk 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

Hugh Pearman, Design Week:
It’s an inspired, eye-opening, colorful gallimaufry of a book about the world and everything that is in it. It deserves to be treated as an immediate classic.

Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector, Royal College of Art, London:
Alan Fletcher's book challenges both dogma and habit by questioning how we see things, how we read things and how we understand things.

Peter Mayle, Author:
Essential reading for anyone with imagination, a pair of eyes and a sense of humour

Len Deighton, Writer:
Ideas are priceless. This book is crammed with great ideas and you can't afford to be without it.

Terence Conran, Designer (also Restauranteur and Entrepreneur):
"A truly poetic canvas is an awakened dream." I'm sure Alan's magnum opus will awaken many dreams.

Book Description:
Master designer Alan Fletcher has spent a lifetime collecting images, ideas, quotations, anecdotes, jokes, memories, reflections and scraps of useless information that take his fancy. In The Art of Looking Sideways, all this stuff is distilled into a quirky and highly entertaining feast for the eye and the mind. Loosely arranged in 72 'chapters', this book explores the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination in a wonderfully inventive sequence of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the art of design. This book does not set out to teach lessons, but everybody who opens it will be captivated by Alan Fletcher's 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 of word and image, who relish the odd and the unexpected, and who don't like to take the visual world seriously.

Synopsis:
Describing himself as a "visual jackdaw", master designer Alan Fletcher has spent a lifetime collecting images, useless information, quotations and scraps that take his fancy. This work distils this collection into a quirky and entertaining feast for the eyes and the mind. Loosely arranged in 72 "chapters", the book explores the workings of the eye, the hand and the brain.

From the Publisher:
This book is the most amazing collection of curious facts, visual puns, anecdotes, serious science, insights, images, jokes, memories and reflections.

From the Author:
I am intrigued by apparently useless information, such as 8% of the population is left-handed; giraffes only sleep five minutes every 24 hours; Italians kiss twice, the Swiss three times; is a zebra a white animal with black stripes or vice versa; and, are you left or right eyed? This book is everything I was never taught at school. It has no thesis, is neither a whodunit nor a how-to-do-it, and has no beginning, middle or end. It is a book for visually curious people, full of things to make you think twice.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Stuck for an idea? Dive in here...
Alan Fletcher was one of the creative powerhouses of design from the 1960s on, and this book puts together some of his musings on life, the Universe and everything. The book is designed to spark ideas and thought, so even the paper used changes from page to page.

In typically quirky fashion, only the left hand pages are given a number so if you buy this book you actually get over a thousand pages of inspiring graphics, calligraphy, typography and photographs collected over the course ... Read More

Rating:

- A homage to concept-driven design and thinking
This book provides so many examples of both the mechanics of a good concept and the power of lateral thinking. A great feat to have documented and communicated such an eclectic range of thoughts and ideas.

Rating:

- Inspirational
This is the book to have next to your desk: dip into it, when you need escape or inspiration. Or start from the beginning and work your way through it: whichever way you do it: I defy you not to find something interesting on virtually every page!!

Rowland Jones

Rating:

- A fantastic collection of interesting "factlets" and a good dose of self-indulgence by the author
What a wonderful title for this book of more than 530 pages. The target is visual awareness and it has 72 chapters devoted to themes such as "ideas", "thinking", "seeing", "camouflage" and "handedness". The author claims it is "a journey without a destination", and he is probably right, the implication being that it is the voyage that counts in life. It is truly a massive collection of bits and pieces collected by the author, thrown on to a basic structure, and presented "shaken not stirred" (to misuse ... Read More

Rating:

- dont just see it - look at it!!
We're all told to do it at design college (and usually dont) then we end up doing it through our creative careers.. and that's find things that inspire us, amuse us, or that we just plain and simply like. why? so we can use them on days when we have no inspiration. This book is one mans fascinating collection of explorations - an intelligent way to really look at things. Come on - open the book, I bet you'll find something in there you like. I bet you.

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