Jessica Helfand

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 …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Paris Dispatch: A Long Way Down

It is difficult, perhaps impossible not to contemplate death on the occasion of a funeral, but to do so in an environment of such remarkable beauty — and such ineffable sadness — amplifies our sense of here and now, of where …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

A Blog Poem, Part II

Designers come, designers goInventing things to crit.But New Year's Eve's our chance to sharePure silliness — and wit.("Speak Up!"—Armin Vit.)

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Code (PMS) Blue

A bout with a nasty flu sent me to the hospital for a chest x-ray last week, which, beyond the x-ray itself, involved nearly six hours spent alone in a small waiting room. As a working mother of two small children, it is rare that I spend …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Time, Space and The Microsoft Colonialists

If Microsoft displayed its marketing genius by introducing "Spaces" three weeks before Christmas, its failure as a compelling editorial product — as evidenced by its restrictive format, its templated narrowcasting, its uninspired …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Donald Trump, Art Director: Not The Real Thing

It's been called refreshing, healthful, sparkling and delicious; scintillating, satisfying, and an aid to digestion. Over the past 106 years, its price has steadily risen to keep apace with economic growth, as has its logo evolved from …