Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Reflections on The Ephemeral World, Part One: Ink

Half-size manila blank paper notebooks with "makeready" covers by Trip Print Press, TorontoI was on a press check recently, deliriously inhaling the pervasive aroma of ink (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it) whereupon, feeling very …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Iron Man: The Screen Behind the Screen

Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man. 2008, Paramount Pictures. Photographs courtesy of Hollywood Chicago.In Barry Levinson’s 1994 thriller, Disclosure, Demi Moore plays a computer specialist who is sued for sexual harassment. (Michael Douglas …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

National Scrapbooking Day

Scrapbook kept by Frederick Nixon-Nirdlinger, Philadelphia, PA 1909. Special Collections, University of Delaware Library.Today, scrapbooking enthusiasts across the United States celebrate National Scrapbooking Day, heralding the meteoric …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Viewer Discretion Advised

Identification card for Anny-Yolande Horowitz, deported to Auschwitz on September 11, 1942. She was seven years old.Early last month, French President Nicholas Sarkozy proposed a new education plan in which every fifth grader would have to …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Animal Magnetism

Magazines are the sole industry in which you cannot help but judge a book by its cover.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Woody Allen's Typography

Woody Allen's typography. (Thanks to Michael Brenner.) [JH]

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Gone, Baby, Gone (Things, Part II)

Things, as we all know, connect us to the world we inhabit. Big or small, expensive or insignificant, our attachments to other people and places begin with things. As infants, we navigate by smell and touch; with the social and verbal …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Remembering Paul Rand

My graduate thesis at Yale was a long, dissertation-style treatise on the history of the square. Only one member of the graduate faculty actually took the time to read it — and that was Paul Rand. "With what little time I've had to …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Things, Part I

In an age characterized by elevated environmental awareness — reducing our carbon footprint, enhancing our sustainable output — we remain obsessed with our attachment to the material world.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Type Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

About a year ago, I participated in a student portfolio review involving nearly a dozen American schools, many (most?) exhibiting the classic projects that characterize all undergraduate design programs — the color studies, the …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Science and Design: The Next Wave

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Stan Brakhage: Caught on Tape

For Stan Brakhage, that concentration resulted in extraordinary explorations of many things, including the life cycle of a moth, caught on adhesive strips of tape, and subsequently captured on film where it regained — however briefly …