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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Join the Revolution, March 31, 2004
This review is from: The Designer Revolution (Paperback)
Valerie Kirschenbaum is a woman with one modest goal: she wants to start a revolution. "The Designer Revolution: The Marriage of Art, Literature, Education, Technology" is the opening shot in her quest, drawn in good part from her experiences as a New York City high school teacher. Why, she asks, in this era of marvelous computer graphics should we continue to read the printed page in the same manner we have done so since the days of Gutenberg? Just as Henry Ford is reputed to have said that you could get a Model T in any color you wanted as long as it was black, so publishers have traditionally told us we can get a book in any color as long as it is black (and white). Kirschenbaum believes that color is one element that should be explored and exploited to make reading come alive, not only for students but for all of us. Color is a tool for emphasis and engagement. Centuries ago in the era of hand-written manuscripts (that is, after all, what a "manuscript" is), color was an integral part of their creation - color not only for illustrations, but color of text to literally illuminate its meaning. With the dominance of mass printing of books on huge, inflexible presses, it made sense that color evaporated for entirely practical reasons. But we are now in another time when such limitations need no longer limit us. If one particular word or a special phrase or sentence or paragraph would benefit from color to emphasize it, then why not apply color? Of course, the color of ink to print the text upon paper is only one aspect of Kirschenbaum's revolution. Integrated illustrations - and not just for children's books - are equally within reach of the computer-equipped author, illustrations that are intimately partnered to the text and not isolated to separate insert pages, corralled together away from words. The third leg of Valerie Kirschenbaum's revolution is the shape of letters themselves, the font with which the words are printed. With computers we have become familiar with the notion that, if we choose to, we can select whatever style of "print" suits our purposes - Arial, Times New Roman, Century Gothic - whatever we want from that pull-down menu from the toolbar on our computer screen. Perhaps without thinking much about it, we are all aware on some level that the design, the "look", of font is important in how we relate and react to what is on the printed page. The shape of the letters speaks to us in an unconscious voice, aiding - or hindering - our reading. Pick up a dozen books and magazines and look at the font. They are not all the same. They speak in different tones, some more friendly, others more formal. But Kirschenbaum goes beyond merely advocating an informed selection of pre-made fonts to suit your purposes. With modern computer graphics, personalized, unique fonts tailored to individual preferences are within practical reach of each computer-savvy author. At the heart of Kirschenbaum's revolution is the realization that computers can erase the line between author and publisher, allowing a unified creative process so that the final product is wholly within the control of a single creator. The physical book "The Designer Revolution" is an embodiment of Valerie Kirschenbaum's writing/publishing ideas, a marriage of color, illustration, and font. Open it and let yourself swim in its visual variety. Open yourself to the idea that computers do not spell the end of the printed page, but its blossoming.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ms. Kirschenbaum, A Latterday Chaucer Pilgrim!, March 7, 2004
This review is from: The Designer Revolution (Paperback)
I finished this fascinating book later the same day I had read in my local daily newspaper that in 2001 a former assistant basketball coach at the University of Georgia had given a final exam for the only grade in a "Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball" course that consisted of 20 multiple choice questions. Two of the 18 questions included how many goals are on a basketball court and how many points does a 3-point field goal account for in a basketball game. So learning about teachers like Ms. Kirschenbaum provides a much needed antidote for the latest news item about education in Georgia. She begins this beautiful book with the following statement: "I will never forget the day that changed my life forever. [With the exception of the wondrous first letter "I" which I cannot describe, I believe those words are in burnt sienna] I was teaching The Canterbury Tales when one of my students raised her hand and asked, 'Ms. Kirschenbaum, how come our books are not in color, like they used to be?'" The author, for ten years a teacher of English at the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities, located just a mile or so from Ground Zero, set about to find an answer to that question. The result is this beautiful book of many colors, designed, written and printed in a "feminine" very reader-friendly font that Ms. Kirschenbaum herself designed. Ms. Kirschenbaum has certainly done her homework. There are 363 pages of text and another 50 or so footnotes. The book is filled with quotations from artists, writers and scientists about the significance of color and all its ramifications. The writer discusses the books before Gutenberg, though not accessible to common people, that were always in color. She also refers to the ancient Greeks, Chinese and Eqyptians who invariably wrote in color. She gives anecdotal evidence from her own teaching experience that an overwhelming number of her students would prefer reading, for instance, Homer, Poe et al in "living color." I think the writer's two stongest points are (1) we are fast losing a whole generation of nonreading students to television, video games, and movies, all in color and (2) because of digital printing, books in color can now be produced economically. Ms. Kirschenbaum discusses many writers, some who used color effectively in their prose, and others whose works cry out for it: the artist and writer William Morris, and William Blake, whom she describes as the "only instance after Gutenberg of a great poet and a great painter married into one magnificent soul." On Emily Dickinson: "Her manuscripts are bubbling with body language [in red letters] -- long dashes, short dashes, angled dashes, crosses, pluses, minuses, waves, curves, line breaks. . . " Finally the writer makes a good case-- Faulkner himself wanted it-- for THE SOUND AND THE FURY to be printed in color. Ms. Kirschenbaum's theory of designer writing has been well received except by some "academics." (The quotations are mine.) "Some people in the academy have refused to take me seriously because I teach high school and not college; because I have only a master's degree and not a doctorate; because I am not an Ivy Leaguer; and God knows what else." One professor even called her "Madame Nobody." She's in good company since Miss Dickinson would say, "I'm nobody/who are you?" And Robert Frost didn't have a Ph.D as I recall. In addition to the brilliant illustrations and colored images here, the text, almost all of it in color, is clear and well written. And Ms. Kirschenbaum is a great punster, both verbal and visual. She sold me on this book when, in first thumbing through it, I found a delightful visual pun at the beginning of the footnotes. What comes through in every page of this book, which I cannot adequately describe, is that Ms. Kirschenbaum is the most dedicated of teachers and decent of people. "Whenever I visit a museum, I seem, unavoidably, to be reminded of my mortality and of the precious chance [red letters] I have been given, as a young American woman, to make a difference in the lives of others." Chaucer would have said of her, "gladly did she learn and gladly did she teach." You must see this book for yourself. I am at a loss as to how to best describe it.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A NEW CANON, March 14, 2004
This review is from: The Designer Revolution (Paperback)
From her unique perspective as a high school teacher, Valerie Kirschenbaum has made some stunning discoveries about learning - that children learn much better when teachers use body language, that body language can be brought into writing with color and image which excite different groups of cells in the brain, that emotional arousal amplifies memory, that there is such a thing as visual thinking, and that word and image used simultaneously integrates brain operations and allows the student to come to a higher level of understanding more quickly. "Especially today," says the author, "if we don't immediately grab them, we too often lose them. Colorful visuals are a way of grabbing their attention, arousing their emotions and of sustaining their interest." In researching the subject, Ms. Kirschenbaum discovered, for example, that "...the image of a Buddha can trigger the release of hormones such as epinephrine and norepinephrine, causing them to interact with nerves in the body and travel to the brain. Literally, the image opens the mind and heart of the reader." And in Tibet, the sight of an image that the viewer perceives as sacred can trigger electrochemical responses in the brain, i.e. readers could SEE concepts. "With the designer word," Valerie maintains, "we can transform traditionally verbal techniques into visual techniques. Rhyme, repetition, metaphor, figures of speech, characterization, tone, simile and symbolism can all be visual. We can foreshadow, change moods, express irony or sarcasm and allude and alliterate visually. The possibilities are endless..."If we cannot always make this exquisite avalanche of consciousness sayable, then we can at least make it showable." Amen to that. It's not exactly rocket science to realize that this could be an incredible aid to reading and therefore to learning in our technological society, but as far as I am aware, nobody has connected these particular dots before this particular young woman came on the scene and pointed them out. Before the advent of Gutenberg, Medieval illuminators used ornament and decoration to create "multiple simultaneous meanings." After Gutenberg, when block black-and-white printing became the norm, "...writers couldn't synthesize their verbal and visual innovations. They couldn't write outside the box and think outside the box simultaneously. They were stuck between word and image, seeing and thinking, left brain and right brain." And while Medieval denial may have been rooted in religion, our modern denial is rooted in an antiquated technology that insists that black and white blocks of texts are the only proper form for serious scholarship and that images, different fonts and color should be relegated to children's books. As Leonard Shlain observed in his groundbreaking work, *The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image*, our era is evolving toward a new integration of left and right brain functions with keyboards, computers, TV, movies, etc. Why cannot that integration be extended to the printed word? This book realizes left and right-brain integration in a most delightful way. I especially enjoyed the color graphics where Medieval, Greek and Renaissance characters are shown to be writing and on closer inspection, you see that they're using computers. I would have liked a snappier title for the book but have to admit that upon this writing, I haven't thought of any. "First a new theory is attacked as absurd," says William James in *Pragmatism's conception of Truth.* "Then it is admitted to be true but insignificant. Finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it." One can only hope that Valerie Kirschenbaum's name will still be remembered long after her thesis has become a new canon. But as she herself admits, in the long run it doesn't matter as long as the new canon is adopted, because "...no matter how much I may have blossomed, I could never stand up before other teachers and writers and designers and not invite every one of them to surpass me." "We will not join the ranks of the Old Canon. We will create a new Canon...."We will seek the rose in the prose. We will find the light in delight." And finally "incipit liberi besti" -"begin beautiful books." I believe this is an idea whose time has come. Bravo!
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