Responding to the need she so clearly perceives, Ms. Dondis, a designerand teacher of broad experience, has provided a beginning text for art and designstudents and a basic text for all other students;those who do not intend to becomeartists or designers but who need to acquire the essential skills of understandingvisual communication at a time when so much information is being studied andtransmitted 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, withits own special alphabet, lexicon, and syntax. People find it necessary to beverbally literate whether they are "writers": or not; they should find it equallynecessary to be visually literate, "artists" or not.This primer is designed to teachstudents 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 cannotyet "read." The analogy provides a useful teaching method, in part because it is notoverworked or too rigorously applied. This method of learning to see and read visualdata has already been proved in practice, in settings ranging from Harlem tosuburbia.Appropriately, the book makes some of its most telling points throughvisual means. Numerous illustrated examples are employed to clarify the basicelements of design (teach an alphabet), to show how they are used in simplesyntactic combinations ("See Jane run."), and finally, to present the meaningfulsynthesis of visual information that is a finished work of art (the apprehension ofpoetry...).