Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand|Projects

Land in Crisis: The Antelope Valley Story

Llano Del Rio Commune, Antelope Valley, California. Photography by Matt Jalbert."If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water."Loran Eisely, The Immense Journey, 1957Under California law, property owners have …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

What's The Story?

And what becomes of all those dead tweets, anyway — all those long-expired, evaporated updates?

Jessica Helfand|Essays

My Facebook, My Self

But as projections of ourselves, one’s Facebook identity, made visible through one’s photo albums, inhabits a public trajectory that goes way beyond who and what we are.

Jessica Helfand|Slideshows

Cats and Their Designers

Behold: our collection of feline wonders, and the designers who named them.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Ten Things That Need to be Redesigned

Everyone has a list of things that need to be fixed. There are small things, like styrofoam containers that leak last night’s leftovers all over your desk, and then there are bigger things — the American health care system, for …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Graphic Design Spam

Advertisement for graphic design school, November 2008. This (as well as the ads that follow) was rescued from my spam filter over the course of the last six months.Those of us who choose, for whatever reason, to enter the profession …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Posters of Padua

Graduation poster, photographed in Padua, March 2008You’d be hard pressed to find tangible evidence of graphic design back in, say, the thirteenth century (though evidence of creative productivity is an unarguable Medieval conceit) but …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Second in a Series: Completions

Photograph by Mitchell Feinberg for New York Magazine, 2006For two years, I’ve had this image on the wall in my studio — a step-by-step examination of a gradually diminishing Mallomar — which (other than a possible symbol for the …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Biblionomatopoeia

Trauma by Patrick McGrath, cover design by Peter Mendelsund, 2008Onomatopoeia is the term used for words that sound like what they are describing — words like zip and boom, for instance — although the concept, it should be …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

First In A Series: Cartophily

Ogden Optical Illusion Cards, early 1930sThe practice of saving cigarette cards — a sub-genre of collecting known as cartophily — formally lies somewhere on the spectrum between postage stamps and posters. (If they resemble the former …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Ephemera, Part III: Aging 2.0

Aging dye, one of the many materials found in the Making Memories Distressing Kit When I was little, my mother had an acquaintance who purchased, at considerable expense, a piece of brand-new furniture. Soon afterwards, she paid someone …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Reflections on the Ephemeral World, Part Two: Food

Summer, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1573. (Oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris)A year or so ago, I was invited to tea, with perhaps half-a-dozen other women, at the home of the mother of one of my children's friends. Upon arrival, I noticed …