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Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life

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"Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk - The mystery of life" covers basic elements of visual design while serving to link these elements into basic aspects of life. Alan Watts presents some of the aesthetic principals underlying both Chinese and Japanese arts and along the way illuminates something of the Taoist and Buddhist philosophies that run underneath them. I'm neither a Buddhist nor a Taoist but the ideas explored in this book are still valid to my work as a designer. Half the fun of this book is that the terms don't belong to English so they often bracket concepts in unusual ways bringing new angles of view on common design principles. Watts also doesn't ignore visual design's ability to be meaningful to people at a deep level. His measured words on the relationship between visual aesthetics and the issues of living from one day to the next provide a balanced counterpoint to many of the works contained in the body of contemporary American and European design theory. I've been returning to this book over and over again since it was published in '78 and can't recommend it highly enough.