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MBP Presents “ABCing: Seeing the Alphabet Differently”
January 7, 2010
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New York, NY – January 7, 2010 – Mark Batty Publisher is pleased to announce a new kind of alphabet book, ABCing: Seeing the Alphabet Differently, a primer to seeing and understanding the visual world. Not your average abecedary, ABCing is a crisp, stylish, colorful board book that will have a permanent home on the bookshelves and desks of creative minds, serving as an excellent point of entry for seasoned designers and students of all ages to learn how new perspectives can provide new meanings.
Author Colleen Ellis uses every letter of the Latin alphabet, pairing each one with design-inspired words like “dynamic,” “imagination” and “scale” to create illustrations using only the negative shapes of a given letter. The shapes are rotated and resized; they are not duplicated, mirrored or otherwise altered. The shapes are then composed as a visual translation of the given word’s meaning, resulting in visual and conceptual mixtures of philosophy, poetry and art.
“The intent is to spur new and alternative approaches to how viewers look at an image, shifting the focus from the subject – the letter – to the surrounding space,” says Ellis. “Using the fundamental principles of Gestalt theory, the book encourages the viewer to see and consider the ‘white space’ as much as they see and consider the letter within it. It suggests how context can define or distort a subject, and that if one looks beyond a letter, or any form for that matter, one will find another story.”
A dynamic website based on the book can be seen at http://www.abseeing.com, which utilizes both motion and sound to offer an entirely different perspective of Ellis’s art and theory.
About Colleen Ellis
Colleen Ellis is an artist who lives and teaches in Massachusetts. As a manuscript this book was awarded an honorable mention for the Susan P. Bloom Discovery Award given by PEN New England Children’s Book Caucus.
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ABCing: Seeing the Alphabet Differently
By Colleen Ellis
Page Count: 64 pages
Size: 6.25 x 6.25 inches (15.8 x 15.8 cm)
Format: Casebound board book
Publication Date: January 2010
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 9780981960043
For a review copy, more information, or to schedule an interview with Colleen Ellis, contact Adri Cowan, +1 347.830.6271, adri@markbattypublisher.com.
