The Art of Looking Sideways

I’m often leary of “inspiration” art books. It’s usually filled with a bunch of things like “stand by a tree and listen to the wind” or “imagine every color of the rainbow exploding on your page”. In a nutshell, they are hokey and usually one-dimensional. I had read about Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways a while ago, and had it on ym list of “to buy” since then. I was always afraid to the pull the trigger, but after his death, I had read how this book was just different. And it is. Here is a detailed explanation from Amazon:

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.

It is something I have been “reading” recently, but it is not a book you would really read cover to cover. You can pick it up every once in a while and read parts of it. Or, it seems you could come back to it years from now and look more closely at one of the “chapters”. And, not only arethe quotes and examples well picked, but the way it is arranged is extremely well thought out. Definitely worth the investment…