The Art of Looking Sideways

If you search on youtube for "the art of looking sideways" you'll come across a 10 minute interview with the late Alan Fletcher. The man was clearly a visionary and apparently loved his Mac ;-)

If you're not into graphic design that much (like me) yet you're into philosophy or psychology, marketing or coaching, leadership or teaching or any other field where the human condition is front & center you'll still find lots of wonderful things in this book, if only by reading the quotes and the stories.

This book has been created by a discovering man, a collecting man and especially a listening and thinking man. He supposedly worked 18! years on this book. No wonder it's such a source of inspiration and insight.

I adore the 'chapters' on creativity and meanings. There are 72 'chapters' in total in this book, each covering a certain 'topic'. I prefer to call them 'mentalities'. Fletcher calls them '72 slices of life' and '72 slices of your brain'.

The two most genius properties of this book are:

- no two pages have similar layout
- you don't know what to expect when turning any page

Only buy this book if you want to discover. Fletcher was a designer but before one can design one has to discover. This book is a discovery by itself and it's filled with thousands of discoveries.

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 of a long and illustrious career: he founded Pentagram; he designed logos for Reuters and the Victoria and Albert museum. The book gives a glimpse of the thought processes that went in to that work. For the money it's an astonishing bargain.

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.

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

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 a common quote from James Bond). Her lies the books major asset and its major defect. It is full of interesting images and text bites, yet at the same time it is full of bits of useless or uninteresting trivia. There are times when you get the impression that the author has been overly self-indulgent, but it is certainly a lesson to us all - collect every little bit of dross since it could become a book one day. Yet it also a fantastic collection of interesting "factlets" and for the price it is certainly worth having on your shelves. I suspect it is also a book that I will go back to occasionally just to skim through the odd 100 pages. I was planning to give this extravagantly over-indulgent book only 3-stars, but in writing this review I've convinced myself to give it a solid 4-stars for its fun content and the gall of the author in thinking his lifetime collection of "odds and bods" would interest others. It did.