“I am, in principle, morally opposed to hero worship, but I’d like to announce that in my next life, I’d like to be Nigella Lawson.” So begins “Time Waits for No Fan,” a memorable piece written by Jessica Helfand for the blog Design Observer, the popular forum she cofounded.
Jessica’s pieces on Design Observer are among my favorites, not only because they are smart, funny, and erudite, but because her contributions consistently manage to bridge the academic with the arcane and almost always contain a uniquely personal insight. She deftly writes about cooking and creativity, gardening and Greer Allen, the Design Police and the Dixie Chicks. And somehow, when Jessica Helfand writes, I sincerely believe that she is writing directly to and for me. Remarkably, I am only one of her many, many admirers who feel this way.
But successful blogging is only one more recent manifestation of Jessica’s abundant talent. A onetime student of Paul Rand, she is a partner in the design firm Winterhouse, an accomplished author, and a critic at the Yale School of Art.
In “Time Waits for No Fan,” Jessica contemplates the cult of celebrity fascination. “Fanship, a splinter group of hero worship, is a natural consequence of contemporary life,” she writes. Well, truth be told: Jessica Helfand may want to come back as Nigella Lawson in her next life, but in my next life, I’d like to come back as Jessica Helfand.
What was your first creative memory?
I have two. I’m not sure if this counts, but I can remember watching TV and hiding under my parents’ bed every time the station identification for CBS appeared, showing the famous “eye” icon designed by William Golden in 1951. I fear that the fact that I responded in terror to a logo says a lot about my career choice.
A few years later—I was probably about 10 or 11 at the time—I was on my way to a birthday party. As we gathered by the door and got ready to leave, my mother handed me the gift, which she’d wrapped rather minimally in plain, brown craft paper. I promptly took off my coat and went to my room to return moments later with a coffee can full of markers. After about ten minutes of channeling my inner Bodoni—lots of letterform, as I recall—I was ready to go to the party. My parents say that’s when they knew I was going to be a graphic designer, although I don’t think I myself knew until about ten years later.
When specifically did you have that realization?
In high school, I took a six-week intensive summer workshop at The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. This was an incredible place—part studio, part think tank—that was a clearinghouse for all sorts of interesting people passing through New York in the 1970s. I remember feeling that life in an office with ugly, overhead fluorescent lamps was unimaginable, but if I could be in a place where people drew all day on drafting tables lit by luxo lamps, then I would always be happy.
Fear of a logo and love of a lamp. There’s a pathology waiting to be diagnosed here, I’m sure.
Did you ever have serious aspirations to pursue any other type of career?
At one point, I was pretty serious about acting. As an undergraduate at Yale, every minute I wasn’t in the studio, I was in rehearsal for something. During the four years, I was in 24 shows, most of them musicals. This was Yale, remember: lots of Cole Porter. I’d played the cello for 15 years prior to college, and I’d always been interested in theater, but I have to say that the catalyst came when I had this boyfriend—for maybe 15 minutes—about whom I remember (not surprisingly) very little except that he used to sing to me.
And one day I was imitating him, and someone overheard me and pointed out that I had perfect pitch and a three-and-a-half octave range. Hello! Fast forward to an audition, and the next thing I know I’m doing the Judy Holliday role in Bells Are Ringing.
Why didn’t you pursue acting?
After I graduated, I went to a few auditions, and I grew pretty disillusioned with the prospects. But I wasn’t ready to go apprentice in a design studio right away, either. So I got a job reading scripts for a producer. Most of the scripts were so dreadful that one weekend I went home and wrote one myself. I submitted it, got an agent, wrote for daytime television—the only television job besides news in those days—and struggled as a scriptwriter for about three years before realizing that, unlike my colleagues, I had no aspirations to move to Los Angeles, drive a Porsche, and write sitcoms. And I really missed making things. One day I looked over my scripts and was amazed to see how visual they were: It was like there was a graphic designer still in me, struggling to break free. I went back to Yale a year later for my MFA, and the rest, as they say, is history.
How would you define the term “graphic design”?
Somehow, I think graphic design succeeds best when it resists definition.
Do you work primarily by hand or with a computer?
Our work at Winterhouse always benefits from drawing, from pinning up our work and drawing right on the wall over it, from sketching not only beforehand but during the process. Computers are great, really, but they don’t do the thinking for you.
Are you wary of people who can’t draw?
I wish I wasn’t, but I have to confess that I think I am. Bill [Drenttel, Helfand’s husband and partner at Winterhouse] can’t draw, and we tease him when he tries to: But he’s so gifted in other ways that it’s easy to forgive him.
Do you find that you have a process for initiating your design work?
We talk and draw, draw and talk. And argue and disagree. And talk some more.
I also get a lot of ideas while I’m driving. Which is good, because we have two children and I’m always driving them somewhere. I have sketch-books everywhere—by my bed, in the car—but half the time, the visual ideas I have end up in the margin of the newspaper or on the back of an envelope. In my next life, I’ll be more disciplined about where I draw—but I do try to draw as much as possible, and get my students to draw. It’s a way to push your visual thinking.
Words don’t replace making things—they can’t. And I think that having grown up in Paris, and having to speak French in school every day, and playing the cello—its own kind of language—I appreciated, early on, the ability to communicate something quickly, instantaneously. That’s what drawing can do and why I have come to believe in it so strongly. It can move an idea along so efficiently. There’s a purity to drawing that I find intoxicating.
Do you have an opinion on pre-design research?
I’m resistant to market research and user testing, even though I recognize and appreciate their benefits from afar. But historical research is an intrinsic part of a lot of our work, and I love it.
When do you know a project is finished?
I don’t. This is why I have a partner, and Bill is like a laser beam in terms of focusing on details, whereas I’m impatient and I lose interest. I’m good at starting things—Bill is, too—but I’m not always so good at finishing them. Mostly, though, we tend to have long-term clients and projects, so the goal is less about finishing than it is about sustaining the energy, coming up with new ways to keep the work fresh.
How do you assess your own work?
With great difficulty. Like most designers, I am pretty competitive, but I’m also not so good at being criticized. Being a mother and a teacher—parallel jobs I’ve come to love and appreciate over the last decade—has made me more critical but also more consistent. As I get older, though, I’m less good at being criticized by others, which is what makes Design Observer [the blog about design and visual culture founded by Helfand, Drenttel, Michael Bierut, and Rick Poynor] sometimes so hard: I find the openness of writing and receiving responses—some of which can be quite harsh—something I’m still getting used to.
If we write too politically, people complain. Too much about graphic (as opposed to other) design, and readers complain. I’m too obtuse one day, too vapid the next. Too abstract and intellectual. Too cultivated. Not cultivated enough. I love blogging, but you can’t win. And as a way of assessing your own work, blogs give you a wide open, no-holds-barred access to your audience—for better or worse.
Put another way: I write to figure out what I can’t make in the studio; I make work in the studio to try to figure out how to engage bigger ideas about design—the ones I can’t quite reach in my writing or get to so directly. And when all else fails, I have a painting studio in my basement that is my true sanctuary.
How do you know when something you’ve created is good?
It is a balance, and maybe too restrictively so, but I’m happiest when I’ve made something new, something I never made before, yet that gestures to something for which I’m already known.
So, for example, I was really proud of Below the Fold—an occasional journal we write, design, and publish from the Winterhouse Institute. We’d never done this before, something this ambitious that combines writing, editing, using our library, and mining our collections; we collaborate and make work in this way.
But even though Below the Fold is a new effort, it’s built upon something very familiar in our work: Not familiar in a repetitive, been-there-done-that sort of way, but familiar in the sense that people know that we’re big readers, that we write, that we live with 8,000 books. So without overstating it, I like that there’s a sort of intentionality, an intellectual appetite underlying the work. And if that’s the backstory, Below the Fold could go on reinventing itself indefinitely.
Do you keep a journal?
No. But a lot of sketchbooks: one for clients, one for paintings, one for collage and travel. One for my daughter, a collaborative sketchbook that we share, which includes elements of all the above.
Do you feel your education has fundamentally influenced your design ability or would you say that you’re more self-taught?
I am a big believer in education. Actually, I am an even bigger believer in a liberal arts education, which is to say that I believe an undergraduate school should provide the broadest education. College is for reading literature and studying language, etc. Art school on top of that is the best possible recipe for living a full life as a designer, because it incorporates both disciplinary breadth in the undergrad curriculum and a kind of critical depth in graduate work that each benefit from the other.
Who is your favorite graphic designer?
I’m a big fan of Ladislav Sutnar. He had an extraordinary gift for balance and grace, an inherent appreciation for a kind of elegant simplicity, and an unmistakable love of theatrical, dimensional scale. Plus, he made mechanicals that were as exquisite as a collage by John Heartfield or Joseph Beuys. And he was versatile—he designed everything, back when there really was something graphic about graphic design.
Who has influenced you most in your career as a graphic designer?
First, Bradbury Thompson, who was my teacher—and I was his teaching assistant—at Yale, and who so impressed me by his humanity, his intelligence, and his generosity. There is no one who has impressed me more as a teacher, nor whose skills as an educator have influenced me more. He proved to me you can be a tough critic and still be a sweetheart.
Cleve Gray was a lesser-known yet prolific painter who died in 2004 and was my mentor for the last few years of his life. When I studied painting in grad school, I was told I couldn’t paint. Cleve showed me not only that I could paint, but that I had to paint. His unwavering devotion to making work every day of his life, and his approach—a blend of focus and forgiveness—have been a huge inspiration for me.
I would also have to say I have been, and continue to be, deeply influenced by my partner, William Drenttel—who also happens to be my husband. We met when I was just out of grad school, and he encouraged me, and continues to encourage me, as both a writer and a maker. Bill is an insatiable reader, an enthusiastic force in the studio, and skilled in so many ways I am not. He’s got an uncanny instinct about clients. He’s gifted three-dimensionally, and he’s prescient—he’s got a sixth sense about where things are headed, and why. He’s a smart, smart art director.
Mostly, though, I have been influenced by his generosity: to his employees, past and present, to our suppliers, past and present, to our colleagues and our clients, our family, and me. He loves graphic design, and if and when I waver, he reminds me why I do, too—often by surprising me. It’s that simultaneous presence of sustained support coupled with a perpetual element of surprise that make me want to do better work.
Where do you see yourself in five years? What are you doing?
The short answer:
Surviving my childrens’ adolescence!
The longer answer:
Healthy and happy.
The detailed answer:
Painting. Making letterpress books in our barn. Teaching. Learning to be a better listener, to be more resilient, to be productive in ways I can’t even envision today.
Do you have recurring dreams or nightmares?
I have two: One is that the laundry hasn’t been done in 12 years and is piled up to the ceiling, only I can’t figure out how to turn the machine on.
The other is that I’m back in graduate school at Yale, being judged by my colleagues on the faculty—with whom I’ve taught for a decade—and they’ve decided that the world has changed so much since I received my MFA in 1989 that I have to do my thesis over again.
What do you think of the state of contemporary graphic design?
At the moment, I’m extremely disillusioned.
I think style has a way of superceding content, that the rise and proliferation of individual technologies have had a negative effect on human civility; and I think that designers are getting complacent. But that’s just today.
I do think that the bigger issue here, with all due respect, is the degree to which graphic design, by its very nature, conspires to lend authority to things that are undeserving. Implicit in this assumption is a set of value judgments that have frequently been raised in the First Things First manifesto: Somebody’s got to design dog food, so why not me? These are things we think about and talk about constantly in our studio. And our children are aware of it too, and should be: It’s not a double standard for us—and our house and studio are attached, making it even more of an issue. We recently designed a milk label for a farmer who couldn’t afford to pay us: We get free milk and eggs for life, instead. Something about this transaction made me more aware of pesticides and added hormones. Among other things.
But there are other kinds of social change: I participated in the New York Art Directors Club debate on “Designism,” and Winterhouse collaborated with AIGA and the NYU School of Journalism to launch the “Polling Place Photo Project,” which was all about the kind of “citizen designer”—or, as NYU’s Jay Rosen would say, the “citizen journalist”—outreach: people using their cell phones to visually document a process, leveraging their right to vote into a project to document their polling places.
It’s not much, but it’s a start. More and more as time goes on, all of our projects are informed, in some way, by enacting some larger, more comprehensive kind of social change. Interestingly, it seldom comes from a kind of manifesto-like appeal or a subversive effort. Rather, it takes collaboration, coordination, concentration. I’m beginning to think design can be a catalyst for change. It can happen. And should.
Is there anything you dislike about being a graphic designer?
Software upgrades make me anxious, and remind me how little control I have over anything. I keep waiting for Adobe to follow Coca-Cola’s lead and bring back Photoshop 1.0…. They could call it “Photoshop Classic,” and people over 40 like me would be in heaven.