The Art of Looking Sideways | 
| Author: Alan Fletcher
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $24.90
You Save: $15.05 (38%)
New (38) Used (18) from $20.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  48 reviews
Sales Rank: 29470
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 534
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.3
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 8.5 x 2.5
ISBN: 0714834491
Dewey Decimal Number: 700
EAN: 9780714834498
Publication Date: August 20, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com 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 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
Product Description
The ultimate guide to visual awareness. Compiled over decades by one of today's most brilliant graphic designers, this is a panoply of curious facts, visual puns, anecdotes, serious science, insights, images, jokes, memories and reflections, with 700 illustrations and quotes from over 1000+ writers. 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, 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 insights 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 43 more reviews...
 Wow ... impossible to describe, yet obviously brilliant August 8, 2008
An amazing effort creating an amazing result.
One of the most remarkable collection of concepts, ideas and observations.
Never fails to nudge the creative mind our of a slump.
Perfect condition! April 28, 2008
The product was shipped the next day and got to me quickly. The book is awesome and was in perfect condition when I got it. Thanks!
 a jumbled mess - but fascinating January 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
the book is big, heavy and has a confusing layout(page numbers refer to spreads, not individual pages) Some pages are printed with black type on darkblue or gray making them almost unreadable (including the index which also has numbers smaller than most eye charts.) There is no index and little way to get back to something you found before without post-its. Yet for all its drawbacks, it's a fascinating compendium of design ideas - ideas in general. Great price for this much imagery. And if one has even a bit of leisure to peruse books for what just might pop out, this would be a good one to have.
One Page a day January 15, 2008
This book is a tour de force of creativity and it is suitable for everyone, not just graphic designers. Each page is so thick and rich that you shouldn't browse through it. I highly recommend you limit yourself to 1 page a day so you can absorb and digest what it contains. It is a stunning whack of creativity that you need to take slowly. Over time this book will help you to see and to think in different ways and with significantly more "creativity".
If you consider yourself to be a creative person you absolutely, positively, have to get this book. It will change you.
 Motivational & inspirational December 24, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
All the scraps of thoughts, quotes, illustrations, art, and scientific insights all blend into a very nice amalgam of a book. I didn't read it from cover to cover, but rather opened up somewhere random and read different pieces. The randomness of all the inspirational thoughts allows for this type of reading - I think it actually makes the book even better. It almost works as the mind itself: getting bits and pieces of information to juggle with really gets your creative juices flowing.
A must have, and must-random-read, for everyone in the creative industries and arts sector. Not sure about what other people should do with it.
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