Biography

Jessica Helfand is a partner, with William Drenttel, in Winterhouse, a design studio in Northwest Connecticut. Their work focuses on publishing and editorial development; new media; and cultural, educational and literary institutions. Recent clients include The Poetry Foundation, Nextbook, New England Journal of Medicine, the U.S. State Department, Norman Rockwell Museum, Yale Law School, New York University School of Journalism, University of Chicago Press and the National Design Awards.

Previously Adjunct Professor at New York University's graduate program in Interactive Telecommunications, Helfand is currently Senior Critic at Yale School of Art and is the author of several books, including Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture (2001) and Reinventing the Wheel (2002), both published by Princeton Architectural Press. She has also written Paul Rand: American Modernist (Winterhouse, 1998). She has lectured at the AIGA National Biennial Conference, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Walker Art Center, Columbia University School of Journalism, the Annenberg School of Public Policy, and the Netherlands Design Institute. She received her B.A. in architectural theory and her M.F.A. in graphic design, both from Yale University.

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director's Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

Recent Essay

Our Shopping Lists, Our Selves

Jessica Helfand on lists: from the mundane to the historical, the shopping list to the Bill of Rights.

Recent Book

Scrapbooks: An American History
Jessica Helfand
Yale University Press, 2008
More Books >>

Design Observer Essays

12.28.12

Ezra Winter Project: Chapter Twelve

In the end, Ezra Winter was a man whose devotion to the classical world virtually underscored his every move: it explained his ineffable pursuit of youth, his enduring worship of women, his unyielding obsessions with fantasy and grandeur, lyricism and scale, theatricality and costume, fable and myth.

11.30.12

Ezra Winter Project: Chapter Eleven

The 1930s would prove to be an enormously fertile period in Ezra Winter’s life: following the success of the Radio City murals, the artist embarked on major commissions for the United States Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve Building and the Library of Congress, and in 1939, he debuted his mural for the New York World's Fair.

10.25.12

Ezra Winter Project: Chapter Ten

In April, 1933, Ezra Winter delivers a fifteen-minute live radio talk on the subject of mural painting in relation to modern life, in which he tries desperately to convince himself that he has embraced the modern world.

09.28.12

Ezra Winter Project: Chapter Nine

The Fountain of Youth would be Ezra Winter's greatest achievement, an enduring cultural icon in the city he loved — and on every possible level, a simply insurpassable feat: it is an extraordinary painting precisely because it is so unbearably autobiographical.