Name Jessica Helfand | Role Author | |
![]() | ||
Books Scrapbooks: An American, Reinventing the Wheel, Six Plus Two Essays o, Paul Rand: American Modernist, The Next Page: Thirty Tab |
Scrapbooks and self works jessica helfand and rebecca johnson melvin
Jessica Helfand (born 1960 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a designer, author, and educator. A founding editor of the website Design Observer, she is Senior Critic at Yale School of Art since 1994, a Lecturer in Yale College, and Artist-in-Residence at Yale’s Institute for Network Science. Named the first Henry Wolf Resident in design at the American Academy in Rome in 2010, she is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.
Contents
- Scrapbooks and self works jessica helfand and rebecca johnson melvin
- Jessica helfand scrapbooks introduction
- Education and career
- Books by Jessica Helfand
- References

Jessica helfand scrapbooks introduction
Education and career

Jessica Helfand is a 1978 high school graduate of George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. She also received both her B.A. in 1982 in Graphic Design and Architectural Theory and her M.F.A. in 1989 in Graphic Design from Yale University.

She has taught since 1996 in the graduate program in Graphic Design in the School of Art, where she is currently Senior Critic in Graphic Design, Artist in Residence at the Yale Institute for Network Science, and a Lecturer in Yale College, where she teaches the freshman seminars "Studies in Visual Biography" and "Blue". She has been visiting professor at Wesleyan University and Paris College of Art, and with Andrew Howard and Hamish Muir is a co-founder of the summer editorial course in Porto, Portugal.

Helfand and partner William Drenttel founded the Winterhouse Studio design firm in 1997. In 2003, along with Michael Bierut and Rick Poynor, they launched the Design Observer blog and website. Helfand and Bierut are co-hosts of the podcast Observatory, which are now hosted by Design Observer.

Helfand has written for many national publications, including the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Aperture, and The New Republic. She is the author of numerous books on design and cultural criticism, including Paul Rand: American Modernist (1998), Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture (2001) and Reinventing the Wheel (2002), which formed the basis for an exhibit in 2004 at the Grolier Club in New York City. Her critically acclaimed Scrapbooks: An American History (Yale University Press, 2008) was named "the best of this year’s gift books" by The New York Times. Design: The Invention of Desire, was published in 2016 by Yale University Press.
She is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and a 2010 member of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame with William Drenttel. In 2010, Helfand and Drenttel were named the first Henry Wolf Residents in Design at the American Academy in Rome. She was appointed by the Postmaster General to the U.S. Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee in 2006, where she chaired the Design Subcommittee until 2012. Helfand and Drenttel were honoured with AIGA medal in 2013.