Véronique Vienne

Writer; Editor; Lecturer / Graphic Design / France /

www.veroniquevienne.com/intro.php

Books Every Graphic Designer Should Read

. . . I am sure that soon enough a genius will come up with an iPhone GPS app that can tell me where I stowed away my copy of In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Diana Vreeland’s memoirs, or the English translation of Boris Vian’s endearing novel L’Ecume des Jours. They are among the books that have helped me understand what design criticism is all about. I’d like to make an argument that they should be on the list of “Books Every Graphic Designer Should Read.” Meanwhile, I recently pulled from my bookcase ten odd volumes I’d like to put on that list as well. . . . View the complete text

I thought that I had an idea that would make me rich. I wanted to develop a smart interactive “wand” that would help me geo-locate my favorite books, many of them tucked in my bookcases in the wrong place or forgotten on a pile somewhere on a table, a ledge, or a chair. This “Book Beeper,” as I called it, would be able to identify a misplaced book with a beep, the same way some devices help you find misplaced phones, remotes, or car keys.

“For your device to be interesting, it has to speak to as large an audience as possible,” said the product designer I eventually consulted. “If it only speaks to you, it’s a prosthesis, not a product.”

A prosthesis, he told me, is a design solution to a specific problem, whereas the kind of objects that make sense nowadays do more than offer answers—they create value and become part of social ecosystems.

Jargon aside, he had just described what makes books still relevant today. They do create value and become part of social ecosystems. There is no faster way to bond with someone than to mention the title of a book and say, “You’ve got to get it. I couldn’t put it down.”

I am sure that soon enough a genius will come up with an iPhone GPS app that can tell me where I stowed away my copy of In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Diana Vreeland’s memoirs, or the English translation of Boris Vian’s endearing novel L’Ecume des Jours. They are among the books that have helped me understand what design criticism is all about. I’d like to make an argument that they should be on the list of “Books Every Graphic Designer Should Read.” Meanwhile, I recently pulled from my bookcase ten odd volumes I’d like to put on that list as well.

My hope is that the following comments will inspire you to search your own shelves for books you want to find, dust, reread, and maybe put aside in a special place in case no one ever figures out the graphical information system that will allow you to track their coordinates.

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Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History

random order

3 books

Suspensions of Perception

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Jonathan Crary

If you love books with footnotes, as I do, you’ll enjoy reading the work of Jonathan Crary. Footnotes are to books what lingerie is to clothes: the furtive underpinning of a narrative. Crary’s footnotes are chatty, gossipy and erudite. They are as fun to decipher as the text they annotate, and if you were to count the words, you’d find out that they are just as lengthy as the main document. Because of the footnotes, reading Crary’s books requires that you split your attention between the top and the bottom of each page, which is appropriate considering the subject matter of his dissertation: the history of human vision and the volatile role of attentiveness in Western culture. . . . View the complete text

ADD sufferers rejoice: according to Crary, attention deficit disorder is a social construction, not a medical condition.

Jonathan Crary is not Malcolm Gladwell. He is not a journalist, he is a scholar—a historian on the faculty at Columbia University. Quite inadvertently he got some exposure in the design community twenty years ago as one of the founders and co-editor of the Zone Books, famously designed by Bruce Mau.

A specialist at heart, he does not attempt to make his thoughts accessible to a large audience, an approach I find surprisingly refreshing, even though I often have to reread his paragraphs a couple of times to make sure that I understand what he means.

Luckily, the sort of attentiveness needed to follow his academic musings is exactly what he is talking about. As you watch your attention wax and wane, and try to rein in your mind in order to follow his reasoning, you are indeed engrossed in the act of “confronting and inhabiting the instability of perception itself.”

His first book, Techniques of the Observer, is considered a classic. Its cover features an anatomical drawing of a frightened patient whose eye is undergoing a surgical intervention, an image that dramatically illustrates Crary’s own probing into the various forms of inquiry that are at the origins of our visual culture. His account of how the concept of “paying attention” was manufactured in the 19th century challenges the assumption that being mentally focused is a natural state.

His second book, Suspensions of Perception, takes the argument further with a careful examination of the paintings of Edouard Manet, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne. He holds their work as evidence of a radical alteration in the way people perceived the visible world—a shift made necessary by the Industrial Revolution.

“Attention thus became an imprecise way of designating the relative capacity of a subject to selectively isolate certain contents of a sensory field at the expense of others in the interests of maintaining an orderly and productive world,” he wrote. In the age of 140-character twitters, his 600-character sentences read like epic narratives.

To appreciate Jonathan Crary’s writing, alternating between attention and distraction is best. If you give yourself permission to skip around his books and let your mind wander between the lines, you begin to experience “the dynamic oscillations of perceptual awareness,” and like Cézanne, you come to see “that the world can only be engaged as a process of becoming.”

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Ways of Seeing

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John Berger

. . . Influenced by Walter Benjamin‘s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, [Ways of Seeing] attempts to expose a conspiracy that has kept the work of artists, and the ideologies their images promote, out of the political discourse. Adapted from a four-part BBC television series, it is a direct transcription of Berger’s script, and it reads as such, as a series of declarative sentences and short emphatic statements. A British painter as well as a novelist, a poet, and art critic, Berger speaks confidently about topics that are familiar to him. His point of view is always based on experience—on what it feels like to paint, observe, touch, watch, look, see, and be seen. . . . View the complete text

Oddly enough, what I find most appealing about this slim paperback is its awkward layout. Set in Univers 75 black, the heavy text jars you out of your comfort zone, frays your nerves, and wears down your resistance with short forcible sentences, until you surrender, bleary-eyed and furrowed brow, to the logic of its Marxist and feminist analysis.

To illustrate the various arguments made by the author, muddy black-and-white reproductions of Western masterpieces consort with tacky advertising images from the early 1970s, a dreadful period in terms of aesthetics. None of those visuals are captioned, though some are identified in the margins. Yet, somehow, for reasons I will try to explain below, Ways of Seeing is a marvelous book.

Influenced by Walter Benjamin‘s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, it attempts to expose a conspiracy that has kept the work of artists, and the ideologies their images promote, out of the political discourse. Adapted from a four-part BBC television series, it is a direct transcription of Berger’s script, and it reads as such, as a series of declarative sentences and short emphatic statements. A British painter as well as a novelist, a poet, and art critic, Berger speaks confidently about topics that are familiar to him. His point of view is always based on experience—on what it feels like to paint, observe, touch, watch, look, see, and be seen.

For him, a masterpiece by Frans Hals is a record of what it must have felt like for the destitute old Dutch painter to portray dour rich folks who looked down on him as a pauper. He argues that the painting is not, as some art critics would have us believe, “a wonderful depiction of the human condition”—a statement he dismissed as yet another sanctimonious art appreciation platitude.

On the chapter of women’s place in the visual culture, he is even more adamant. “A woman must continually watch herself,” he writes. “She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” Traditional art museums are filled with paintings, sculptures, and drawings documenting the way men look at women: as possessors, collectors, masters, lechers, voyeurs, and judges. Apparently docile and compliant, the gorgeous creatures portrayed in the buff are the reflection of this masculine sense of entitlement.

Though he admires the skills of artists who can move us with masterful representations of beautiful things, Berger insists that the main reason rich merchants collected—and still collect—priceless art pieces is “to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy . . . how it will reward the touch, the hand of the owner.”

Ten years before he elaborated the script of the Ways of Seeing series, Berger had voluntarily exiled himself to an isolated rural community in France where he was able to observe and write about farmers and migrant workers. This could explain why the design of the book is so raw and gritty. Berger tracks ideas the way peasants push their plow. He leaves no clump of dirt unturned, and only stops when our field of vision is completely covered with deep parallel furrows.

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Techniques of the Observer

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Jonathan Crary

[Crary's] first book, Techniques of the Observer, is considered a classic. Its cover features an anatomical drawing of a frightened patient whose eye is undergoing a surgical intervention, an image that dramatically illustrates Crary’s own probing into the various forms of inquiry that are at the origins of our visual culture. His account of how the concept of “paying attention” was manufactured in the nineteenth century challenges the assumption that being mentally focused is a natural state.

Also see my comments on Suspensions of Perception for an appreciation of Crary’s work.

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