Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Why Is This Font Different From All Other Fonts?

Bagel, designed by Per Jørgensen, 2002.Earlier this spring, our local art-supply store closed its doors, but not before slashing the prices of its remaining inventory. Among life's many temptations, the promise of discount art …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

My Dirty Little Secret

Photograph from "Beginner Gardening." Happy News Vol. 1 No. 1, 2007.I have become an obsessive gardener. Not that I am any good at it — in fact, quite the opposite. Yet I persist in what's become an endless struggle to tame our …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Ad Reinhardt, Graphic Designer

Ad Reinhardt, detail of scrapbook page, ca. 1934. Courtesy of Smithsonian Archives of American Art.The American abstract expressionist painter Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt, who died in 1967 at the age of 54, is remembered as a …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The New Manifest Destiny

In the series Modern History (1978), the artist Sarah Charlesworth photocopied the front pages of newspapers and reframed the news by blocking out all the text, leaving only the masthead and photographs in their relative positions. The …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Ephemera: Town & Country Cookbook

Cover, Town and Country Cookbook, 1953Books are, by their very nature, often judged by their covers. Like miniature posters or single-frame film trailers, the book cover is the visual prologue to what lies beneath. Book cover designers are …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Art Director Ken

Art Director Ken © Mattel, 2003.Ken, who turned 46 yesterday, shares a birthday with eighteenth-century chemist Joseph Priestly, nineteenth-century astronomer Percival Lowell, and twentieth-century singer songwriter, Neil Sedaka. (And …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Lost, O Lost

Photograph of Evelyn Waugh by Douglass Glass."Literature is either the essential or nothing." — Georges BatailleThe English writer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) is perhaps best known for his satirical portraits of the British upper …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Illusion of Certainty

Allan McCollum, Each and Every One of You, 2004. 1200 digital inkjet prints. Photograph courtesy Barbara Krakow Gallery.Last fall, at a small gallery on West 22nd Street in New York, the artist Allan McCollum exhibited his new system for …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

I'm Not Ready to Make Nice

It's a tough time to be a critic. Everyone's got an opinion they're all-too-eager to deliver, and in today's wiki-esque maelstrom of information sharing, we're all supposed to be equal. In the best case scenario, knowledge aggregation is …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Not-So-Golden Age of Zero Tolerance

When I was a student, the assignments and their expected outcomes were intentionally conceived as chore-like, specific and frankly, narrow. This was the age of zero tolerance: deviation from a designated format was neither an approved …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

How Hollywood Nailed The Half-Pipe

Pixar and Animal Logic have mastered a particularly persuasive (and as it turns out, rather literal) form of spin that makes Road Runner look like dryer lint.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Into the Pink

In Western culture, new baby girls are welcomed into the world with rosy pink layettes. Over time, the pale hues of infancy fade away, giving way to more keenly saturated pastels as a child creeps toward toddlerhood. Later, pink is …