Jessica Helfand

[Jessica Helfand] (born 1960 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an artist, writer, and designer. She grew up in Paris and New York City, and received her BA and MFA from Yale University. From 1996-2018 she taught in Yale College and in the graduate program at the Yale School of Art. A founding editor of the website [Design_Observer Design Observer], she is the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism, including Scrapbooks: An American History (Yale University Press, 2008); Face: A Visual Odyssey (MITPress, 2019), and Self-Reliance (Thakes&Hudson, 2021.) The first recipient, in 2010, of the Henry Wolf Residency at the American Academy in Rome, she was a 2018 Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri, a 2019 fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, and the 2020 Artist in Residence at Caltech. She lives and works in New England.

Jessica Helfand is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

Born in Philadelphia, Jessica Helfand was raised in Paris and graduated from George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania in 1978.[3] She received her BA (in Graphic Design and Architectural Theory) in 1982 and her MFA (in Graphic Design) in 1989, both from Yale University. In 1990 she was appointed Design Director for the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, and three years later, she started her own studio. In 1997 she joined her late husband, William Drenttel, to start Winterhouse which they co-directed until Drenttel’s death in 2013.

From 1982 until 1986 she wrote soap operas for Procter & Gamble, and eventually became a junior scriptwriter on CBS’s Guiding Light. That year, Guiding Light won the Daytime Emmy for best writing.

For more than twenty years, Jessica Helfand taught at Yale University where she was Senior Critic in Graphic Design, the Artist in Residence at the Yale Institute for Network Science, a faculty affiliate in the History of Science and Medicine, and a lecturer in Yale College. From 2009 to 2016 she taught two freshman seminars "Studies in Visual Biography" and "Blue,". Then, from 2016 to 2018 she taught design at Yale School of Management. “We will approach it as one might a second language,” she explained, “introducing theory and practice, defining visual grammar, reframing expression, construction, and craft.”

With Andrew Howard and Hamish Muir, Helfand was a co-founder of the summer editorial course in Porto, Portugal. She was a visiting professor at Wesleyan University (2012) and at Paris College of Art (2014). In 2019, she was appointed visiting professor at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK.

Helfand and her late partner William Drenttel founded Winterhouse Studio — a design studio, institute, publishing imprint, and foundation — in 1997. In 2003, along with Michael Bierut and Rick Poynor, they launched the Design Observer blog and website.[1] With Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand cohosted 132 episodes of The Observatory (2014 to 2019); in 2016, they launched a second podcast, The Design of Business | The Business of Design, which spawned an annual conference by the same name. [8][9] Fortune Senior Editor Ellen McGirt took over as the show's new co-host in the fall of 2019.

Helfand has written for many national publications, including the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Aperture, and The New Republic.[10] 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.[11] Design: The Invention of Desire, was published in 2016 by Yale University Press. Culture is Not Always Popular, a fifteen-year anthology of Design Observer was co-edited by Michael Bierut and Jarrett Fuller, and was published by MIT Press in 2018. Face: A Visual Odyssey was published in 2019, also by MIT Press. In 2021, Helfand’s most recent book — Self-Reliance — was published by Thames & Hudson.

Appointed by the Postmaster General to the U.S. Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee in 2006, Jessica Helfand chaired the Design Subcommittee until 2012. She is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and, with William Drenttel, held the first Henry Wolf Residency at the American Academy in Rome in 2010. Helfand and Drenttel were each honored with an AIGA medal in 2013.

A 2018 Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri and a 2019 fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, Jessica Helfand was the winter 2020 Artist in Residence at the California Institute of Technology.

She is the daughter of the late collector William H. Helfand.

As a comparatively early practitioner working with technology in her studio practice, Jessica Helfand has been invited to participate in several conversations about AI and its relationship to the creative process. She spoke at Cooper Hewitt in 2019 as part of an exhibition featured in that year’s London Design Biennale (which took top honors); at Caltech in 2023, and later that same year, in an online symposium sponsored by the Royal College of Art in London. As an visual artist, she has spoken widely about AI's potential to generate and gestate new ideas about form, particularly regarding her own work in portraiture.

In a 2021 lecture, Jessica Helfand explained her practice this way:

For me, painting is the act of bearing witness: adding dimension, shifting focus… a kind of photo-based, adaptive portraiture, reasserting an implicit, if hidden dignity to the people I paint. An anonymous subject is not a lost subject, but a noble one, with the enduring humanity that we can’t help but recognize as our own.

She elaborates further on her website.

This work—the work of deep character study— is enlivened by research in general, and by primary sources in particular: letters, diaries, photographs, and ephemera provide a kind of material affirmation, documentary evidence hinting at the contours of a person’s imagined (but believable) human experience. The research here is rooted in the words of others. My observations are adapted from their experiences, not my own. (I sometimes say I paint like a method actor, and this is why.)

Helfand’s most recent exhibition, The Service Society—a series of portraits based on the Irish domestic servants who were employed by a number of wealthy American families during the Gilded Age— is informed by extensive archival research. A solo show of thirty-five of these paintings was held in the spring of 2024 at Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York. The gallery featured eight new paintings as part of the INKMiami Art Fair, at Art Basel Miami later that same year.

• Face: A Visual Odyssey, MIT Press. (ISBN 978-0262043427)
• Culture is Not Always Popular, with Michael Bierut, MIT Press. (ISBN 978-0262039109)
• Design: The Invention of Desire, Yale University Press. (ISBN 978-0300205091)
• Scrapbooks: An American History, Yale University Press. (ISBN 978-0300126358)
• Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture, with John Maeda, Princeton Architectural Press. (ISBN 978-1568983103)
• Reinventing the Wheel, Princeton Architectural Press. (ISBN 978-1568985961)
• Looking Closer 3, Vol. 3: Classic Writings on Graphic Design with Michael Bierut, Steven Heller and Rick Poynor, Allworth Press. (ISBN 978-1581150223)
• Paul Rand: American Modernist, William Drenttel Editions. (ISBN 978-1884381164)
• Graphic Design America 2: The work of many of the best and brightest design firms from across the United States, with DK Holland and Chip Kidd, Rockport Publishers. (ISBN 978-1564966810)

• First Things First 2000 manifesto

• "William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand". AIGA | the professional association for design. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
• Gonzalez, Susan (2013-04-01). "Yale graphic designers honored for work in the studio and classroom". Yale News. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
• "Jessica Helfand '78 Publishes Design: The Invention of Desire - George School". George School. 2016-05-30. Archived from the original on 2017-08-19. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
• "Design Insight—and Breakfast!—with Jessica Helfand". Continuum Innovation. 2017. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
• Studies in Visual Biography Archived 2011-12-11 at the [Wayback_Machine Wayback Machine]
• "Creative Classroom: Seminar immerses freshmen in many things blue". Yale News. 16 April 2014. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
• "Design Observer". SoundCloud. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
• "Designers Jessica Helfand and Michael Bierut Launch Podcast on Business and Design". Yale School of Management. 2016-10-19. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
• [Gerda_Breuer Breuer, Gerda]; Meer, Julia (2012). Women in graphic design 1890-2012 = Frauen und Grafik-Design [1890-2012] (2nd rev. and corr. ed.). Berlin: Jovis. pp. 471–473. ISBN 9783868591538. [OCLC_(identifier) OCLC] 825553454.
• Garner, Dwight (27 November 2008). "Suggestions for Gift Books". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
• “Jessica Helfand Talks Blue: Uwire.” College Press Releases and University Wire Service.

• Jessica Helfand
• Interview with Madame Architect
• Short biography from Yale University School of Art
• Articles by Jessica Helfand on Design Observer
• Winterhouse Institute
• Emigre 51: First Things First, 1999