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A compelling defense for the importance of design and how it shapes our behavior, our emotions, and our lives Design has always prided itself on being relevant to the world it serves, but interest in design was once limited to a small community of design professionals. Today, books on "design thinking" are best sellers, and computer and Web-based tools have expanded the definition of who practices design. Looking at objects, letterforms, experiences, and even theatrical performances, award-winning author Jessica Helfand asserts that understanding design's purpose is more crucial than ever. Design is meaningful not because it is pretty but because it is an intrinsically humanist discipline, tethered to the very core of why we exist. For example, as designers collaborate with developing nations on everything from more affordable lawn mowers to cleaner drinking water, they must take into consideration the full range of a given community's complex social needs. Advancing a conversation that is unfolding around the globe, Helfand offers an eye-opening look at how designed things make us feel as well as how--and why--they motivate our behavior.
A delightful look at the history of the information wheel
Designer and critic Jessica Helfand has emerged as a leading voice of a new generation of designers. Her essays--at once pithy, polemical, and precise--appear in places as diverse as Eye, Print, ID, The New Republic, and the LA Times. The essays collected here decode the technologies, trends, themes, and personalities that define design today, especially the new media, and provide a road map of things to come. Her first two chapbooks--Paul Rand: American Modernist and Six (+2) Essays on Design and New Media--became instant classics. This new compilation brings together essays from the earlier publications along with more than twenty others on a variety of topics including avatars, the cult of the scratchy, television, sex on the screen, and more. Designers, students, educators, visual literati, and everyone looking for an entertaining and insightful guide to the world of design today will not find a better or more approachable book on the subject.
This second volume displays the work of 37 of the best designers and design firms from across the United States. Organized by DK Holland of the Pushpin with Chip Kidd and Jessica Helfand, the selection presents such firms as Looking, Los Angeles; Post Tool, San Francisco, Modern Dog, Seattle; Carlos Segura, Chicago; Go Media, Austin Texas; Greteman Design, Wichita, Kansas; P. Scott Makela, Minneapolis; Werner Design Works, Minneapolis; and Design!, Atlanta.
A revered classic of American design delights anew with the freshness and ingenuity of its approach Bradbury Thompson (1911-1995) remains one of the most admired and influential graphic designers of the twentieth century, having trained a generation of design students while on the faculty of the Yale School of Art for more than thirty years. The art director of Mademoiselle and design director of Art News and Art News Annual in the decades after World War II, Thompson was also a distinguished designer of limited-edition books, postage stamps, rationalized alphabets, corporate identification programs, trademarks, and sacred works (most notably the Washburn College Bible). Thompson also design...
What should Lolita look like? The question has dogged book-cover designers since 1955, when Lolita was first published in a plain green wrapper. The heroine of Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel has often been shown as a teenage seductress in heart-shaped glasses--a deceptive image that misreads the book but has seeped deep into our cultural life, from fashion to film. Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design reconsiders the cover of Lolita. Eighty renowned graphic designers and illustrators (including Paula Scher, Jessica Hische, Jessica Helfand, and Peter Mendelsund) offer their own takes on the book's jacket, while graphic-design critics and Nabokov sch...
Edited by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo. Texts by Derek Birdsall, Ivan Chermayeff, Shigeo Fukuda, Milton Glaser, Diane Gromeala, Jessica Helfand, Steven Heller, Armin Hoffmann, Takenobu Igharashi, John Meada, Richard Sapper, Wolfgang Weingart and Massimo Vignelli.
Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design brings together the best of designer Michael Bierut's critical writing—serious or humorous, flattering or biting, but always on the mark. Bierut is widely considered the finest observer on design writing today. Covering topics as diverse as Twyla Tharp and ITC Garamond, Bierut's intelligent and accessible texts pull design culture into crisp focus. He touches on classics, like Massimo Vignelli and the cover of The Catcher in the Rye, as well as newcomers, like McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and color-coded terrorism alert levels. Along the way Nabakov's Pale Fire; Eero Saarinen; the paper clip; Celebration, Florida; the planet Saturn; the ClearRx pill bottle; and paper architecture all fall under his pen. His experience as a design practitioner informs his writing and gives it truth. In Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, designers and nondesigners alike can share and revel in his insights.
"This book explores the work, ideals and ventures that have helped define the last fifty years of the graphic design profession. Learn about the women who helped establish design's relevance, importance and impact."--Back cover.
An elaborately illustrated A to Z of the face, from historical mugshots to Instagram posts. By turns alarming and awe-inspiring, Face offers up an elaborately illustrated A to Z—from the didactic anthropometry of the late-nineteenth century to the selfie-obsessed zeitgeist of the twenty-first. Jessica Helfand looks at the cultural significance of the face through a critical lens, both as social currency and as palimpsest of history. Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, she examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes. From vintage advertisements for a “nose adjuster” to contemporary artists who reconsider the visual construction of race, Face delivers an intimate yet kaleidoscopic adventure while posing universal questions about identity.