Reddit reviews Ways of Seeing

Ways of seeing by John Berger. A great book on visual communication.

How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul by Adrian Shaughnessy. The title says it all.

The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. My go-to book on typography - covers everything related to typography with beautiful detail.

Pretty fabulous list! I would've tossed in John Berger's Ways of Seeing and some Jung, though. Penrose's Road to Reality has been in my "to read" queue for ages.

No problem! I have no experience with the UK industry but I can't imagine it's too different:

• My degree was a necessity. Job/intern experience was preferred and mine definitely helped my application, but since I started at an entry level gallery job (as a curatorial assistant) it was the degree that was the most important thing.
  
  
• There's not a huge market, honestly, in terms of simple availability - there are plenty of art galleries, sure, but there are way more people trying to get jobs in them. I'm not working in my specific field of interest, but I can't really be picky at this early stage of my career. It also depends what you want to go into: curating, conservation, acquisitions, education, exhibition design, fundraising, research, auction houses, consultation... art history as a degree opens so many more doors than people first realize, I think. Some of these fields are a lot more specialized than others.
  
  
• Books in general: my favourite is probably the Art in Theory three-part series. For AH as an academic discipline, you really can't go past it. I also really like Berger's Ways of Seeing, which is a really important text for analyzing artworks. For an overview of the art itself, Gombrich's The Story of Art is a good bet. The Getty's Guide to Imagery series is also fascinating (and very wide-ranging).
  
  
• Resources: subscriptions to JSTOR, ABM (Art Bibliographies Modern), ProQuest, and Grove Art / Oxford Art Online will be your best friends. If you're at uni, you should have access through your school. I'm also a huge fan of Trove (it's an Australian resource but there should be a comparable English one) which allows you to search for resources by subject/keyword and then tells you where said resources are located (both digitally and hard copy).
  
  Hope that helped a bit!

There's a few books that are good for understanding how design works; John Berger's Ways of Seeing, Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton, and anything by Stefan Sagmeister, Steven Heller, Michael Beirut, Jessica Hische, Adrian Shaughnessy...

Check out publications like Eye magazine and Creative Review.

No doubt from looking up any of these you'll find oodles more too.

Also, the best way to learn is to work with designers, ask them questions, find out why they do something. Have a critical mind though, there's some awful designers out there.

I'm afraid I don't have many resources specific to UX/UI. I studied graphic design at university so I really just apply my understanding from that, but there's loads out there.

>.. so before MTV people didn't desire women for their attractiveness?

Of course not. Please site the part of my previous post where I said that this has changed since music videos.The idea that "women have wanted to look good for centuries" isn't because women innately want to be pretty - they want to look pretty because they want to be accepted.

Prior to MTV these different roles were/are perpetuated in art and literature, obviously. There's a rather notable book that tends to be a required text in academia (usually for art history or cultural studies, though I was assigned it in an epistemology class) called The Ways of Seeing by John Berger . Here's how he explains the role of art from antiquity through the present affecting how women see themselves:

>A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

So sure, women have wanted to look good for centuries - but because it was seen as important to them by the community. No one had to tell them to do anything because it was understood. You don't see the parents of teenagers in upper-middle-class suburbs ordering their offspring to go to uni after high school at gunpoint. The kids generally accept that that's simply what you're supposed to do, even if it may not be in their best interest to go at that time (or ever). Again, humans are social animals, so free will is finite and partially influenced by what you've observed regardless of what gender, race, or class you are. There are people who break away from the norm, but these people aren't common, otherwise there would be no norm to break away from

>No one thinks music videos actually give career advice.

No, but what you see influences what you do. Remember my references to famous people whose careers aren't based on their attractiveness? If this is part of the cultural mix along with music videos, then there are more ideals to emulate, which influences what people think women are capable of doing. Why do people make such a big deal over the gay couple in Modern Family? It's not that educated, affluent, relateable gay couples haven't existed in the world before, it's that it breaks people's assumption that gay people have to be part of a subculture, weak, or overly feminine. This assumption exists because people are influenced by what they see in real life and in media.