Jessica Helfand on Blue

This month Jessica Helfand taught her workshop on the color blue at Escola Superior de Arts e Design in Matosinhos, Portugal, to the ESAD MA students in Communication Design. “Blue” is all about creating new and personal experiences, taking risks, and finding new meanings in a subject as simple—yet expansive—as a color.

For the class, students were asked to close their laptops and spend a few hours in the city collecting as many blue things as possible. All objects were then edited to form a spectrum and through a few elimination steps, all non-essential objects were removed until only fifty-three objects remained. These became the “vocabulary” to be applied by the students in creating their final projects.

Jessica Helfand and Andrew Howard.