New term ahoy!

08Jan08

Flu has been vanquished and I am back at university. I’ve got a review type thing tomorrow, but am not stressed. I’ve got work to show, plus I feel refreshed and am full of ideas, plots and wild schemes for the new year. I imagine tomorrow will be a more productive post, when I have feedback to think about. For now, I just want to mention the most recent book I’ve been diving into. The Art of Looking Sideways, by Alan Fletcher. 

“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.”- quote from the author.

I went to see Alan Fletcher’s retrospective at the Design Museum a while back, and I really enjoyed that show. His work is clever and looks good, and quite rightly deserved an exhibition. Some pieces in particular I really liked (they will get posted shortly, maybe), and as this book has been recommended to me many times, I was looking forwards to getting it immensely.For starters,yes it is pretty impressive. It’s incredibly thick and each page has been designed differently. I think I read at the exhibition that it is based on a grid system, but one that’s so complex and open to variation that you can’t tell. (You really can’t.) It’s an awesome achievement. But…a few pages at a time is probably the best way to tackle it. Too much at once is like eating all the chocolates in the box all at once – yes, they are all yummy, but after too many you can’t tell them apart and then you start feeling a little bit sick. For someone like me, who loves to read, the idea of only taking a few pages at a time is very alien. There is some design work, which is what I really wanted from it, but a lot of it is random thoughts, pieces of information, and countless other tiny pieces of interesting stuff. At first that was alright, but as the holidays went on I still couldn’t really get into it. There is so much information in there, it makes it difficult to remember anything in particular. I think because in every day life I get bombarded with so much “stuff”  (quotes, pictures, videos, music, articles etc) that I can only take in so much, and so when I read, I like to have something that is the opposite of this overload.  I don’t feel right not liking this book, because there is so much in there that is interesting and useful, but I think maybe once I’ve got through it, that it may be a wonderful present for someone else. (Or popping up on eBay soon.) I feel that although it is a wonderful idea for a book, it is full of the sort of things you have to find out for yourself in your own way for them to be relevant to you, although I think that the ones in this book maybe could act as a starting point for your own creative adventures. Over and out x G   

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Tags: alan fletcher, book review, graphic design, the art of looking sideways