Jessica Helfand
Showing 541 – 552 of 562 results
Jessica Helfand|Essays
One Person, One Vote, One MRI?
In our little New England village, voting takes place at the local Town Hall, a small building on Main Street with two entrances that lead to one large room containing a single voting booth. In the last primary, local officials placed …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Graphic Flanerie
I have often wondered what a reality TV program about graphic design might be like. Would it feature, say, an imperious figurehead who could make or break the nascent career of a young designer? Would it be modeled on survivalism? On …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
The Lying Game
Agence France-Presse—Getty ImagesEarlier this week, Nationalist Party protesters in Taiwan picketed their highly disputed political election with doctored images of President Chen Shui-bian: the idea was to depict his shame by …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Annals of Typographic Oddity No. 2: Spaceship Gothic
An upcoming auction of space memorabilia at Swann Galleries features a number of unusual specimens of paper ephemera which have miraculously survived the last half-century of American (and Soviet) space exploration. Who designed them? …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Blanket Statements
Psalm 23 Quilt, Lena MooreAn exhibit currently on view in New York at the American Folk Art Museum explores the visual texture of language through a selection of approximately twenty quilts made by women over the last 150 years. Here, …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
The DNA of AND: Ampersand as Myth and Metaphor
From corporate rhetoric to consumer cliché to faux finishes and desktop veneer, truth has gone from being a steadfast principle to a silly posture. Once the stuff of morals and fables, its presence in everyday life has become an …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Annals of Typographic Oddity: Mourning Becomes Helvetica
It isn't often that The New York Times runs a 6-column headline on the front page. This kind of editorial real estate is typically reserved for something cataclysmic — a coup d'etat, for instance — and looks goofy and …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Regarding the Photography of Others
In an interview published in yesterday's Guardian, David Hockney makes a case for the implausibility of photographic truth: asserting that photography is as fictional as painting, his argument is an odd sort of inversion of Susan Sontag's …
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 …