Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand|Essays

New Models for Design Efficiency: Introducing Otto

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Adventures of Cynic Boy and Design Mom in 3D

Left: Miramax Film Corp, ©2005. Right: Reddy Kilowatt Ashton B. Collins Sr. ©1926.Now that summer is here and my children are out of school, I have embarked upon a series of seasonal activities familiar to working mothers …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Cut: When Life Imitates Art (I Mean Design)

I dreamt a few nights ago that I was watching a television game show called Photoshop! in which designers, as contestants, were asked to capture images from the web in front of a live studio audience. Suddenly a photo of a horse merged …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Method Designing: The Paradox of Modern Design Education

Over a century ago, Konstantin Stanislavsky revolutionized the modern theatre by introducing a new system of training, in which the actor would draw on his or her own emotions to achieve a true understanding of a character. "We protested …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Greer Allen: In Memoriam

Designer, critic, pundit and historian, Greer Allen was Senior Critic in Graphic Design at Yale School of Art. He designed publications for The Houghton Library at Harvard, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Extremely Young and Incredibly Everywhere: The Public Art of Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer published his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, to critical acclaim only three years after graduating from Princeton University, where he won the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior Creative Writing thesis …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Design Police

Now that cell phone cameras are a ubiquitous part of everyday life, it may come as no surprise that not everyone need be a professional photographer to publish their work. There's an engaging pull to the kinds of photographs that emerge …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Scrapbooking: The New Paste-Up

"Craft-born embellishments," note one supplier of scrapbooking products, "are penetrating an unexpected market: graphic design."

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Our Bodies, Our Fonts

Family Tree ©2000 Zhang HuanBody markings — piercings, tattoos and so forth — have recently evolved into a kind of marginalized form of graphic expression, yet one that sheds an unusual light on some of the more mainstream …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

My Friend Flickr

Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite that was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada company founded in 2002. It’s a utopian oddity — a culture enabled by a technology that in turn enables a …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The New Paper Chase: Cyberspace on The Auction Block

People who collect things are typically drawn to social history — the idea, for example, that an entire era can somehow be encapsulated in a single artifact. Collections of artifacts testify therefore to the notion that history …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

All Rise!

On the scale of true confessions, this one lies somewhere between admitting I once wrote for a soap opera and divulging my complete incapacity to recall keyboard commands in Adobe Illustrator. But there it is: when I'm hopelessly stuck, a …