Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Crisis of Intent

Victor Schrager's photographs currently on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York are dream-like and unsettling: richly saturated, they're a cross between the urban drama of a Hugh Ferris drawing and the sobering stillness of a Gerhard …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

You're Going to Hollywood, Baby

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Span of Casual Vision

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Mind the Light, Light the Mind

I was driving in the car recently when one of my children asked me to explain Quakerism. (A propos of what, now, I can't recall, though a similarly unprovoked opening conversational gambit came several days earlier, when the same child …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

A Blog Poem, Part I

Designers DevelopDistinctive DementiaDenying Dear Debts Due Descendants now Dead;Doubt and Denial,(Dada? Or de Stijl?)Design Does DefileDamned Discourse, instead.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Sign Language: Endangered Species or Utopian Uprising?

Many of my students have, over the years, considered the street writ large as a kind of flexible, experimental canvas. Their sources — and here I would include everything from Aaron Siskind to Gabriel Orozco — inform work in …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

On Visual Empathy

In a world besieged by unpredictable atrocities, don’t we all feel a little emotionally raw? Two recent articles in suggest that visual empathy may more critical to a productive imagination than we thought.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Implausible Fictions

At a symposium several weeks ago at the Annenberg School for Public Policy in Philadelphia, we gave a presentation in which we discussed some of the more vexing consequences of graphic design and what we've come to call faux science: …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Color Me Kurt

An article in today's New York Times discusses the new direction for Colors under the editorial leadership of critic, author, editor and part-time radio host Kurt Andersen.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Fatal Grandeur

In one of the annotations to my design manifesto, "Me, The Undersigned," I wrote somewhat sarcastically of the seriousness with which some of us view our profession by noting, "Design is probably not going to kill you if it falls on your …

William Drenttel|Twenty Years of Design Observer

Culture Is Not Always Popular

A keynote presentation by Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel at the AIGA conference in Vancouver, October 25, 2003.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician I

I went to college with a very sharp guy who once claimed that the problem with sociology was sociologists, who were, as far as he was concerned, merely self-proclaimed experts on the obvious. "All sociologists really do," he once observed, …