Featuring publications of relevance to our industry, including those cited in SDS e-newsletter lead articles and suggested additional reading, we’ve recently relaunched the SDS Reader’s Corner book of the month page. Each month we will showcase a suggested read that relates to our professional areas of interest, be it a seminal publication or something more tangential. We hope the books we select will offer you insights and inspiration.
If you any suggestions of books, particularly newly published ones, that you think would be of interest to our community, please email us: enquiries@signdesignsociety.co.uk.
For April ’24 we feature ‘A Primer of Visual Literacy‘, by Donis A. Dondis (published in paperback by MIT Press, on 15 September 1973).
Synopsis
“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.”
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.”
BUY A COPY NOW! As of 03.04.2024 this publication retails at £33.00 (paperback), available to purchase via Bookshop.uk.