| Primer of Visual Literacy
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Responding to the need she so clearly perceives, Ms. Dondis, a designer and teacher of broad experience, has provided a beginning text for art and design students and a basic text for all other students—those who do not intend to become artists 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 transmitted in non-verbal modes, especially through photography and film. Understanding through seeing only seems to be an obviously intuitive process. Actually, developing the visual sense is something like learning a language, with its own special alphabet, lexicon, and syntax. People find it necessary to be verbally literate whether they are "writers": or not; they should find it equally necessary to be visually literate, "artists" or not.
This primer is designed to teach students the interconnected arts of visual communication. The subject is presented, not as a foreign language, but as a native one that the student "knows" but cannot 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 see 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 clarify the basic elements of design (teach an alphabet), to show how they are used in simple syntactic combinations ("See Jane run."), and finally, to present the meaningful synthesis of visual information that is a finished work of art (the apprehension of poetry...).
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By CMO (S. Paul, MN)
IF you have to read this for class and quote it - then buy it. Otherwise skip to a different book about "The Elements and Principles of Art" from the 21st century.
By Kevin B. Winebold (New York, NY USA)
This book was required for class, so I wasn't expecting it to be incredibly enjoyable; I wasn't wrong. The information is great, and the author obviously knows what she is talking about. The delivery of said information, however, is very dry and dated, and almost gets too academic while you're trying to study art. Know that you need this information, it just might be easier to digest from another source.
By R. Francis Smith (Brooklyn)
This book is extraordinarily frustrating. Dondis has so much good information--but it's obscured by what I find to be very poor writing. I found her sentence structure difficult to apprehend, and she's way wordy. Add to that the type face used--all sans serif! There's a reason that almost all books are printed in serif typefaces--and it's not tradition, it's ease of use. How bizarre that a book that is meant to clarify and explicate the use of visual media would employ a user unfriendly font.
I've tried to read this book twice, and even have used ideas that I found in that space while teaching a class on art appreciation. I SOOO wish that someone would take the info, rewrite it with sentences that actually flow, and lay it out in a readable font. Anyone up for that? In unleashing some really wonderfully illuminating information, you'd be doing the world much good.
By B. Lane (New York, New York USA)
This is a wonderful book that brings understanding to visual/cognitive procedures that are usually assumed to be more instinctive than evident.
It would be nice to have this classic updated to include form and media from the 20-odd years that have passed since it was published
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