Customer Reviews

Visual Literacy: A Conceptual Approach to Solving Graphic Problems

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am launching a high school commercial art program in the fall of 2000 and, while doing research, stumbled upon "Visual Literacy." It stopped me dead in my tracks; the quest for a concise source of design principals, assignments, and assessments was over. I kept telling myself that it was too good to be true, you simply cannot find a resource that is so complete, comprehensible, and engaging. I chalked it up as a fluke and proceeded to continue my research. To resume the search was a waste of time, Visual Literacy was the total package. Two thumbs way up.

I think this book is an extraordinary source for designers to expand not only the way they work but the way they find new and different solutions for problems.
Richard Wilde, takes you in to exciting exercises and techniques to free your potential, to relax and look for deeply introspectation, motivating your imagination to go beyond cliches.
The best way to describe this book will be quoting Albert Einstein: Imagination is more important than knowledge, knowledge is limited, imagination encircles the world.

Yes, it has some good exercises for students. However, it was not what I expected because they did not really explain concepts and graphic principles along the way. Also, it would have been better to label this a guidebook and for it to be spiral-bounded to add to its ease of use.

It only has a few exercises that are really good for a college-level class (a visual communications class).

OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS BOOK! i am a high school art teacher looking for a starting point on how to revamp my graphic design class. Although this book is college level and the illustrations by the students are amazing, i use the exercises to get my students to really challenge themselves and get their creative juices flowing. I especially like the layout of how the author gives the problem on one page, and then shows how each student chose to solve the problem on the following pages. Every exercise in this book is challenging, creative, and most important, fun to do. i tried them myself. it was interesting to see the results from each student and how different they were. i wish i had problems like this when i was a graphic design major in college. i highly recommend this book if you are an educator looking for great visual problem solving projects.

Before buying this book you have to realise this is merely an exercise book. The amount of explanation or theory is extremely limited. And neither they elaborate on the student examples they chose for their book. Nor do they explain why some solutions might be better than others. The exercises itself could be more challenging, they really seem to be aimed at first year students. You will have to buy at least a book on graphic design principles/theory to put the exercises in this book into the right context. Nothing wrong with that, but they 'forgot' to mention all that on the back cover, so to speak.

It's a nice idea, but its execution is flawed and way too limited to be the stroke of genious that some reviewers want you to believe.

Inspiring, educational, and beautiful to look at. There really needs to be more books like this that help communicate the breath of possible visual solutions to design problems. Highly recommended.

This book, oh, this book.

To put it simply, if you have already learned the principles of design and would like to challenge your creativity, buy this.

If you are just beginning in your quest of knowledge, steer clear.

It is simply a book full of examples, nothing more.

If you are teaching basic design concepts, this book is an excellent collection of exercises. I recommend teaching this along with Design Basics by Laurer and Pentak.

As a sophomore advertising student in Richard's "Visual Literacy" class at SVA, I learned to see the hidden beauty of... just about everything. The assignments included were both artistically and intellectually stimulating; one project that I don't believe is included in the book was "Point of View," in which he asks you to show one object from six different perspectives (not from different views, more from say... a mouse's perspective, your mother's perspective, the perspective of a giant). It was the perfect blend of creating and thinking, both outside of the box. Buy this book. Use this book. It is great for creative block, and more fun than kindergarten!

These excersizes are set into motion by Wilde himself in a class, quite obviously called Visual Literacy at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. The information I must share is an element of these problems and solutions that is not present from just the book alone. His class is an auditorium packed with about 150 students, every week we hand in these solutions- and every week he features the creme of the crop on two movie theater size projection screens. I believe that the competition among us students is the driving force behind these visual problems. The will to succeed and be considered the best is what breathes life into the paper.