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The Art of Looking Sideways
By Alan Fletcher
Phaidon Press Inc., 2001.
Reviewed by Michael McPherson
Graphic designers (presumably with the support of publishers)
seem to have embraced the principle that size matters. First there
was Life Style, Bruce Mau's cinder-block-size illustrated
meditation/portfolio. And now, at more than a thousand pages and
weighing in at slightly less than a large infant, we have Alan Fletcher's
The Art of Looking Sideways.
One of the founding partners of the celebrated multidisciplinary
design firm Pentagram, Fletcher is a consulting art director of
the Phaidon Press, the book’s publisher. It was through Graphic
Design: Visual Comparisons, a modest volume he and his pre-Pentagram
partners, Bob Gill and Colin Forbes, authored and designed in the
1960s, that I first became aware of the expressive possibilities
of graphic design. The good taste, agile wit, and sense of fun and
play of that book are in full display in this career-capping tome.
The book is not designed to be read in the usual way, beginning-middle-end.
The Art of Looking Sideways is a vast assemblage of visual
and verbal epiphanies, gathered during a lifetime of reading, looking,
and collecting, a kind of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
on steroids. A quote from Balzac—”Strolling is the gastronomy
of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live,”—is
apt, for the book is best experienced as a stroll, picking up this,
pondering that, until the weight of insights overwhelms our ability
to absorb. A self-described “visual jackdaw,” Fletcher
encourages us to experience without analyzing, to relax our minds
and to open our eyes.
In addition to the thousands of lines from Blake, Whitman, Goethe,
et al., the book includes photographs, illustrations, cartoons,
drawings from Fletcher’s sketchbooks, and other visual and
mental bric-a-brac nested into 72 chapters, with titles like Composition,
Symbols, Value, and Imaging. Occasionally, the quotations verge
on the precious. Words from e. e. cummings, “always the beautiful
answer who asks the more beautiful question,” inscribed on
a single page in Fletcher’s expressively spiky writing, is
the kind of thing that gives calligraphy a bad name. But such lapses
are few. The inventive typographic interpretations of various texts
are a treat, for Fletcher rarely repeats himself, and he is a master
of matching typographic form with the voice and content of the words.
For his whole career, Alan Fletcher has practiced design with intelligence,
curiosity, insight, and exuberance, and all those virtues are on
display in this volume. Every page touches on the primal impulse
to assemble the elements of the world into coherent and lively wholes,
to design. I am confident that many future designers will
cite their first encounter with The Art of Looking Sideways
as a career-launching event.
Michael McPherson is a partner and creative
consultant at Corey McPherson Nash in Watertown, Massachusetts.
This review originally appeared in the Fall
2002 Design Management Review
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