Jessica Helfand
Showing 469 – 480 of 562 results
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Annals of Ephemera: Town & Country Cookbook
Cover, Town and Country Cookbook, 1953Books are, by their very nature, often judged by their covers. Like miniature posters or single-frame film trailers, the book cover is the visual prologue to what lies beneath. Book cover designers are …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Art Director Ken
Art Director Ken © Mattel, 2003.Ken, who turned 46 yesterday, shares a birthday with eighteenth-century chemist Joseph Priestly, nineteenth-century astronomer Percival Lowell, and twentieth-century singer songwriter, Neil Sedaka. (And …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Lost, O Lost
Photograph of Evelyn Waugh by Douglass Glass."Literature is either the essential or nothing." — Georges BatailleThe English writer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) is perhaps best known for his satirical portraits of the British upper …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
The Illusion of Certainty
Allan McCollum, Each and Every One of You, 2004. 1200 digital inkjet prints. Photograph courtesy Barbara Krakow Gallery.Last fall, at a small gallery on West 22nd Street in New York, the artist Allan McCollum exhibited his new system for …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
I'm Not Ready to Make Nice
It's a tough time to be a critic. Everyone's got an opinion they're all-too-eager to deliver, and in today's wiki-esque maelstrom of information sharing, we're all supposed to be equal. In the best case scenario, knowledge aggregation is …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
The Not-So-Golden Age of Zero Tolerance
When I was a student, the assignments and their expected outcomes were intentionally conceived as chore-like, specific and frankly, narrow. This was the age of zero tolerance: deviation from a designated format was neither an approved …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
How Hollywood Nailed The Half-Pipe
Pixar and Animal Logic have mastered a particularly persuasive (and as it turns out, rather literal) form of spin that makes Road Runner look like dryer lint.
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Into the Pink
In Western culture, new baby girls are welcomed into the world with rosy pink layettes. Over time, the pale hues of infancy fade away, giving way to more keenly saturated pastels as a child creeps toward toddlerhood. Later, pink is …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
What Makes A Good Poster?
"Designing Effective Posters," Design by Jeff Radel, PhD., Department of Occupational Therapy Education, University of Kansas Medical Center.At its core, the school science fair of my youth was an excuse to engage in two of my favorite …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
My Cup Holder Runneth Over
Mini-Cooper Cup Holder Console Set, ©2005, Mini-Stuff, Inc.Glance through the door of any of the countless nail salons sprouting up on virtually any city block, and you'll see numerous women (and a fair number of men) getting …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Death 'N' Stuff
Smoking Kills: The label days it all. Or does it?
Jessica Helfand|Essays
The Ovalization of The American Mind
Left: A typical standardized test. Right: DNA blood sample.As a graduate student at Yale in the late 1980s, I studied with many of the great, late European masters who preached (among other things) the virtues of geometry. Back in those …