Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture

by Jessica Helfand, John Maeda (Introduction)

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 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.

Genres: Design

208 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2001

About the author

Jessica Helfand is a designer, artist, and writer. Educated at Yale University, where she has taught for more than twenty years, she is a cofounder of Design Observer and the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism. The first Henry Wolf Resident at the American Academy in Rome, Helfand has been a Director's Guest at the Civitella Foundation and a fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation. She will be the artist in residence at the California Institute of Technology in the winter of 2020.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad - tad unfocused - needs an expanded update!

[Yokusun Basi]

Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture by Jessica Helfland (2001)

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel's essays on Design and new media are pretty essential. They can get a little self-important in the way that is natural for a trained designer facing the "user-generated" generation of "designers" but that doesn't dilute the message at all.