Responding to the need she so clearly perceives, Ms. Dondis, a designer and teac
her of broad experience, has provided a beginning text for art and design studen
ts and a basic text for all other students;those who do not intend to become art
ists or designers but who need to acquire the essential skills of understanding
visual communication at a time when so much information is being studied and tra
nsmitted in non-verbal modes, especially through photography and film. Understan
ding through seeing only seems to be an obviously intuitive process.
Actually
, developing the visual sense is something like learning a language, with its ow
n special alphabet, lexicon, and syntax. People find it necessary to be verbally
literate whether they are "writers": or not; they should find it equally necess
ary to be visually literate, "artists" or not.This primer is designed to teach s
tudents the interconnected arts of visual communication. The subject is presente
d, not as a foreign language, but as a native one that the student "knows" but c
annot yet "read." The analogy provides a useful teaching method, in part because
it is not overworked or too rigorously applied.
This method of learning to s
ee and read visual data has already been proved in practice, in settings ranging
from Harlem to suburbia.Appropriately, the book makes some of its most telling
points through visual means. Numerous illustrated examples are employed to clari
fy the basic elements of design (teach an alphabet), to show how they are used i
n simple syntactic combinations ("See Jane run."), and finally, to present the m
eaningful synthesis of visual information that is a finished work of art (the ap
prehension of poetry...).
