Steven Heller

Steven Heller|Baseball

Take Me Out to the Old Yankee Stadium

The new Yankee stadium, like most retro stadiums, bears the burden of being faux, a recreation, like a Disney version of reality. It works and it doesn’t.

Steven Heller|Essays

How Much Is That Artifact in the Window?

Design and Style #3, cover by Seymour ChwastMany of us have bought design objects for pleasure or scholarship. We’ve paid big bucks or a pittance. But what determines the value? Is it simply supply and demand or some abstract idea of …

Steven Heller|Essays

Father of Shrek, Grandfather of Tweet

The cover of William Steig's book CDBWilliam Steig (1907-2003), was often way ahead of the curve. His book of drawings, The Lonely Ones (1942), prefigured the now common practice of satirizing personal neurosis; his children’s book, …

Steven Heller|Essays

Japanese Face Masks

In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, you may recall seeing scores of surgical face-mask-wearing passersby navigating their ways through the dense futuristic metropolis that is a cross between Tokyo and LA. It always struck me as odd — yet …

Steven Heller|Essays

The Good Books

Kommt, sehet de Kunst, Die Bibliophilen TaschenbücherWhy can’t American publishers produce a series of good — no great — books on graphic culture like Die Bibliophilen Taschenbücher? Published in 1979 by Harenberg Kommunikation, …

Steven Heller|Essays

That Pesky Television Test Pattern

Indian head test patternWhat came first, television or the television test pattern? By all accounts, the once ubiquitous, static bullseye that appeared on kinescopes and cathode ray tubes from the 40s through the 70s before stations began …

Steven Heller|Essays

My Dada

Steven Heller, as a student at SVARobert Hughes once described the weekly paste-up night at the East Village Other as "a Dada experience." The year was 1970 and while none of us who were toiling into the wee hours of the morning at one of …

Steven Heller|Essays

Draw Me Schools Of Commercial Art

Long before isms, ologies and otics. Before the Chicago Bauhaus, Yale, RISD, Cranbrook and Cal Arts. Before commercial art was called visual communications, the correspondence school was the principal American academy of art and an early …

Steven Heller|Essays

History of Aggressive Design Magazines

Neue Grafik, September 1958  Graphic design evolved during the late nineteenth century from a sideline of the printing industry into an autonomous field with its own lore, icons and personalities. The missing link in this evolutionary …

Steven Heller|Essays

In Praise of the Anthropomorphic

"Disarmament Conference", illustration by Fritz Eichenberg, 1977  I’ve been asked by many students lately, “what is the future of illustration”? I usually refuse to answer on the grounds that I may incriminate myself by …

Steven Heller|Essays

Charles Peignot: Man Behind the Faces

Peignot typeface designed by A.M. Cassandre for Deberny & PeignotIn 1929, Charles Peignot, director of the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot, sponsored A.M. Cassandre's experimental new display typeface called Bifur. Its complex …

Steven Heller|Slideshows

Go West, Young Art Director

Cover of West, May 1971, art direction by Mike SalisburyWhen veteran magazine art directors get together to drink mojitos and reminisce about the glory years before advertising pages broke up editorial wells and when covers were based …