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The Art of Looking Sideways | 
 enlarge | Author: Alan Fletcher
Publisher: Phaidon Press Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £24.95
Buy New: £15.68
You Save: £9.27 (37%)
New (31) Used (15) from £14.36
Rating:  35 reviews
Sales Rank: 910
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 534
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.3
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 8.5 x 2.5
ISBN: 0714834491
Dewey Decimal Number: 700
EAN: 9780714834498
ASIN: 0714834491
Publication Date: June 30, 2001
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. Shipped from UK Mainland. Delivery is usually 2 - 3 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail.
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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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 30 more reviews...
 "Your phd for living" September 23, 2008
Steven Devijver (Europe, usually)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Stuck for an idea? Dive in here... March 24, 2008
Chris H (Bristol, UK)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
A homage to concept-driven design and thinking May 27, 2007
Peter Courtley (London, England)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
Inspirational January 27, 2007
T. R. Jones
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
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
 A fantastic collection of interesting "factlets" and a good dose of self-indulgence by the author December 30, 2006
Bernard Smith (Somewhere, Europe)
13 out of 16 found this review helpful
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.
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