Jessica Helfand Quotes

In A Life In Books, author and graphic design visionary Warren Lehrer crafts a vivid kaleidoscopic odyssey that frames one man's life through not one, but one hundred different books - and book jackets ... An unmistakably modern evocation of the illuminated manuscript.

Remarkably, studies of visual perception have found that two-dimensional images projected onto the retina only achieve full dimensionality as a result of our perception: we infer the third dimension of depth. Sadly, though, as the urgency to expedite all communicative transactions usurps out customary patterns of exchange, perception is accelerated as well. There does not seem to be a great deal of time left over to infer
or interpret, or imagine
much of anything at all. In the end, of course, there is nothing real about this at all, except for our propensity to let it happen.

Graphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye.