Circle Of Clear Seeing

Today I’ll be talking about the Circle Of Clear Seeing. I believe this short lecture is an essential starting point for any graphic designer-to-be. First of all ı want you to close your eyes and think of all the visual messages that are part of your life; your fingers on the handlebars during your first bicycle ride, or if you had a city-life chilhood then imagine your hands on your new Gameboy; the smile from your favorite teacher during your highschool graduation; red blood dripping frfom a cut on your leg; a passionate look from a lover… These visual messages are all a part of your repertoire of memories. These personalmoments are forever stored in the gray recesses of your brain. Now think of the personal visual messages you have experiences but have forgotton: where did you end up in you first bicycle ride? Or the faces of your fellow graduates sitting next to you while you waited for your diploma. The face of the doctor who treated your cut leg, the pictures on the wall of your lover’s bedroom… Actually when you come to think about it, the porortion of remembered to forgotten images is quite small. Why are a chosen few easily recalled while a vast array of ambiguous memories are lost? Like a personal favorite movie quote, Blade Runner; ‘’ All those memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.’’ Back to our topic, Clear Seeing. There was a man called Aldous Huxley, author of the novel Brave New World (already bought from amazon will tell you how it is soon) and other works of futuristic vision, detailed his efforts to teach himself how to see clearly in his 1942 work The Art Of Seeing. It should be known that Huxley suffered from a degenerative eye condition known as keratitis punctata from the age of 16. One eye was merely capable of light perception, and the other could only view an eye chart’s biggest letter from 10 feet away. In his book he described the physical exercises he used to overcome his handicap without the aid of glasses. However, his main idea is that seeing clearly is mostly result of thinking clearly. Huxley summed up his method for achieving clear vision with the formla: ‘’sensing plus selecting plus percieving equals seeing.’’ The first stage of clear vision is to sense. To sense, or look, simply means letting enough light enter your eyes so that you can see objects immediately around you.Sensing also depends on how well the many parts of the work. Obviously, a damaged or improperly functioning eye will hamper sensing. Think of the human visual process as a camera without film; that is, little mental processing occurs during the looking phase of visual perception. Huxley’s next stage is to select a particular element from a field of vision. Toselect is to isolate a specific part of the scene within the enormous frame of possibilities that sensing offers. That isolation is the result of the combination of the light gatheringand focusing properties of the eye with the higher level functions of the brain. Selecting is a conscious, intellectual act. When you select you engage more fully the objects in the scene than when you merely look. About seeing, Huxley wrote that ‘’ the more you know; the more you see.’’ A former baseball player watches and sees a baseball game much differently from someone who attends a game for the first time. The newcomer probably will miss signals from a manager, scoreboard details, the curve of the ball’s flight as it speeds from pitcher to batter, and many other details observed by the former player. The last stage in Huxley’s visual theory is to percieve; that is , you must try to make sense of what you select. If your mind has any chance of storing visual information for long-term retrieval and to increase your knowledge base, you must activey consider the meaning of what you see. You must concentrate on the subjects within a field of view with the intent of finding meaning and not simply as an act of observation, which demands much sharper mental activity. The more you know, the more you sense. The more you sense, the more you select. The more you select, the more you percieve. The more you percieve, the more you remember. The more you remeber, the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more you know. The goal of visual communicator isn’t simply to have an image published or broadcast. The goal of a visual communicator is to produce powerful pictures so that the viewer will remember their content. Images have no use if the viewer’s mind doesn’t use them. As future image consumers and producers, you’ll want to see or make images that others remember.