Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand (born 1960, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a designer, author, and educator. A founding editor of Design Observer, she is Senior Critic at Yale School of Art, a Lecturer in Yale College, and Artist in Residence at Yale’s Institute for Network Science. Named the first Henry Wolf Resident in design at the American Academy in Rome in 2010, she is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

History

Jessica Helfand is a 1978 graduate of The George School in Newtown, PA and received both her BA in Graphic Design and Architectural Theory and her MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University. She has taught since 1996 in the graduate program in Graphic Design in the School of Art, where she is currently Senior Critic in Graphic Design, Artist in Residence at the Yale Institute for Network Science, and a Lecturer in Yale College, where she teaches the freshman seminars "Studies in Visual Biography" and "Blue". She has been visiting professor at Wesleyan University and Paris College of Art, and with Andrew Howard and Hamish Muir is a co-founder of the summer editorial course in Porto, Portugal.

Helfand is also a "founding writer" of the Design Observer weblog with Michael Bierut and a co-host of the podcast, The Observatory.

Helfand has written for many national publications, including the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Aperture and The New Republic. She is the author of numerous books on design and cultural criticism, including Paul Rand: American Modernist (1998), Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture (2001) and Reinventing the Wheel (2002), which formed the basis for an exhibit in 2004 at the Grolier Club in New York City. Her critically acclaimed 'Scrapbooks: An American History' (Yale University Press, 2008) was named that year’s best visual book by 'The New York Times'. [1] Jessica Helfand’s next book, Design: The Invention of Desire, will be published in 2016 by Yale University Press.

She is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and a 2011 laureate of the Art Director's Hall of Fame. In 2010, she and William Drenttel were named the first Henry Wolf Residents in Design at the American Academy in Rome. She was appointed by the Postmaster General to the U.S. Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee in 2006, where she chaired the Design Subcommittee until 2012. Helfand and Drenttel were honoured with AIGA medal in 2013.[2]

Scrapbooks: An American History

Scrapbooks is critically acclaimed and was named the best visual book by The New York Times in 2008. In writing this book, Helfand set out to learn about the widespread hobby of scrapbooking, how it got started, how it has evolved, and why people keep visual diaries of their lives. She collected hundreds of scrapbooks that range in time from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. She learned so much more than she expected and remarks, "To spend any time at all with these scrapbooks is to fall a little bit in love with the people who created them. They remind us who we are, where we’re going – and perhaps why, in the end, it might actually matter.”

Books by Jessica Helfand

Online Essays

The following essays are drawn from Helfand's work for Design Observer.[3]

Sources

References

  1. "Designers & Books Jessica Helfand". Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  2. "AIGA Medal: William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand". Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  3. "Jessica's Published works on Designer Observer". Jessica Helfand. Retrieved 3 December 2011.

External links

See also

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