The
Art of Looking Sideways
by Alan Fletcher
Phaidon Press, London and New York, 2001
533 pp., illus. 390 b/w, 295 col. Trade,
$39.95
ISBN 0-7148-3449-1.
Beware
Wet Paint
by Alan Fletcher, with a commentary by
Jeremy Myerson
Phaidon Press, London and New York, 2004
266 pp., illus. 250 col. Trade, $59.95;
paper, $29.95
ISBN: 0-7148-3354-1; ISBN 0-7148-4378-4.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa
Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A.
ballast@netins.net
I've never
seen a jackdaw, a relative of crows and
magpies and a bird that's apparently common
throughout much of the British Isles.
Foxy, resourceful and fearless, it sometimes
mimics human speech, and (like a child)
is easily distracted by things that are
shiny and colorful. As I learned from
these two extraordinary books, for years
I have been witness to the creations of
a "visual jackdaw" (his words) in the
sense that I've known and admired the
work of a London-based graphic designer
named Alan Fletcher. The son of a British
civil servant, he was born not in England
but in Kenya in 1931, which means this
year he will observe his 73rd
birthday. Beware Wet Paint (which
initially came out in the mid-1990s) is
a retrospective album of his work as a
graphic designer, which began in 1957,
when, having studied at various British
and American art schools (including with
Josef Albers at Yale), he worked for the
Container Corporation and Fortune
magazine. Returning to London in 1959,
he soon became a founder with Colin Forbes
(a British schoolmate) and Bob Gill (an
American designer) of a legendary partnership
called Fletcher Forbes Gill. A decade
later, he was a founding partner of Pentagram
Design, a now-famous design firm. He left
Pentagram in 1992 to set up his own free-lance
business in London, one result of which
has been his position as a design consultant
for Phaidon Press (publisher of both these
titles), which is as much heralded today
for the elegance design of its books as
it is for the wealth of their contents.
Fletcher's style is often recognizable,
so that when you see these books (both
of which he designed in every detail),
you may find yourself exclaiming, "Oh
yes, he's the one who did the cover of
The Art Book" and the subsequent
books in that series. Beware Wet Paint
offers reproductions of 250 examples of
Fletcher's design work, with brief editorial
musings about his creative process, and
a series of separate essays about his
life, education, and influences. I feel
fortunate to have both these volumes,
but if I had to choose just one, it would
be The Art of Looking Sideways.
Nearly two and a half inches thick, with
a weight of almost five pounds, it is
a massive collection of excerpted passages,
visual exemplars, and Fletcher's observations
on how to look at life in ways that are
instructive, thought-provoking, and always
out of the ordinary. It looks as if it
came about by commingling flotsam with
jetsam in an ocean of unfettered color,
exotic printing papers, and typographic
trail runs, especially with gestural writing.
As I was growing up in the 1950s, a question
that was often asked was "If you were
marooned on an island, what book would
you want to have with you?" Asked that
now, I would not hesitate to name Alan
Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways,
which is magnificent stimulant for creative
thinking, designing, and teaching.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review.)
