Customer Reviews
Stuck for an idea? Dive in here... - By: Chris H, 24 Mar 2008 
Alan Fletcher was one of the creative powerhouses of design from the 1960s on, & this book puts together some of his musings on life, the Universe & everything. The book is designed to spark ideas & thought, so even the paper used changes from page to page.
In typicallly quirky fashion, only the left hand pages are given a number so if you buy this book you actuallly get over a thousand pages of inspiring graphics, callligraphy, typography & photographs collected over the course of a long & illustrious career: he founded Pentagram; he designed logos for Reuters & the Victoria & 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 - By: Peter Courtley, 27 May 2007 This book provides so many examples of both the mechanics of a good concept & the power of lateral thinking. A great feat to have documented & communicated such an eclectic range of thoughts & ideas.
Inspirational - By: T. R. Jones, 27 Jan 2007 This is the book to have next to your desk: dip into it, when you need escape or inspiration. Or start from the beginning & work your way through it: whichever way you do it: I defy you not to find something interesting on virtuallly every page!!
Rowland Jones
A fantastic collection of interesting "factlets" and a good dose of self-indulgence by the author - By: Bernard Smith, 31 Dec 2006 
What a wonderful title for this book of more than 530 pages. The target is visual awareness & it has 72 chapters devoted to themes such as "ideas", "thinking", "seeing", "camouflage" & "handedness". The author claims it is "a journey without a destination", & he is probably right, the implication being that it is the voyage that counts in life. It is truly a massive collection of bits & pieces collected by the author, thrown on to a basic structure, & presented "shaken not stirred" (to misuse a common quote from James Bond). Her lies the books major asset & its major defect. It is full of interesting images & 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 alll - collect every little bit of dross since it could become a book one day. Yet it also a fantastic collection of interesting "factlets" & for the price it is certainly worth having on your shelves. I suspect it is also a book that I will go back to occasionallly 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 & the galll of the author in thinking his lifetime collection of "odds & bods" would interest others. It did.
dont just see it - look at it!! - By: wayne, 21 Oct 2006 We're alll told to do it at design college (and usuallly dont) then we end up doing it through our creative careers.. & that's find things that inspire us, amuse us, or that we just plain & simply like. why? so we can use them on days when we have no inspiration. This book is one mans fascinating collection of explorations - an intelligent way to reallly look at things. Come on - open the book, I bet you'll find something in there you like. I bet you.
