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

Jessica Helfand (Author), John Maeda (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jessica Helfand is partner with William Drenttel in Jessica Helfand | William Drenttel, a design consultancy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press; 1 edition (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568983107
• ISBN-13: 978-1568983103
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #726,386 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

This project percolated in my brain (and my sketchbooks) for years until I realized that scrapbooks were simply visual autobiographies filled with stories waiting to be told. I am fascinated with the degree to which non-visual people felt, for whatever reason, compelled to keep these remarkably visual records of their lives. Its a chapter in American history (and in graphic design history) that has not been told: in my book I call it outsider art with insider knowledge. It's raw and primitive and heartbreaking and real, and if it bears little if any resemblance to contemporary scrapbooking, it's probably because a generation ago, people made things from the detritus of their lives: they rescued things, saved and savored them, and pasted them in the pages of books. And therein lies the scrapbook's particular and enduring magic.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Digital Critic with Challenges and No Solutions, June 1, 2003

By 

Jason A. Tselentis (Charlotte, North Carolina U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture (Paperback)

Design on the screen takes the shape of websites, animation, motion graphics, and oh yeah... television. Long before the Mac and Windows boxes on your desk moved points of light, the television was doing it. In Screen, Helfand continues her critical review of all that is visually projected at us through flat screen monitors and television sets. In this collection of essays and critiques, the overall feeling is cynical and embittered. Helfand directly challenges the designers of screen spaces and interfaces to take a stand and make decisions using technology as a secondary objective. Use the pixels, don't let them use you. It's a boastful book, one that'll make you wonder what more can be done.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Big thoughts come in small packages, November 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture (Paperback)

Although the amount of writing about design has grown remarkably over the last several years, only a small bit of it is actually any good. And while I think an increased amount of discourse is generally a positive thing, I think in design's case we've come to the proverbial fork in the road. On one side, there's the swaggering, portfolio-bloated, semi-literate design monographs of the last several years. On the other side, there's truly critical, topical, didactic design writing whose words aren't just there as dummy text. If this latter direction is the one in which our discourse wishes to travel, then we should all take a page out of Jessica Helfand's glorious new book, Screen. For literate designers who've come down with cabin fever over the last few years, Ms. Helfand's book is like taking a spin around the neighborhood, touching on topics from Victorian cultural history to Media Studies and everything in between. Meticulously considered and reconsidered - many of these essays were first published elsewhere - Screen reminds us that writing about a field as simultaneously aesthetic and analytic as design takes time and effort. In turn, our time and effort should be spent on these thoughtful essays, for they are a both a gift and a direction from one of the very best we have.

3.0 out of 5 stars Out of touch, May 16, 2010

By 

Ghaida Zahran (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture (Paperback)

This book was written in 2001, and it shows. This book was assigned reading in one of my courses in grad school. Lots of "big" ideas are brought forward in this book, and Helfland philosophizes an industry that is saturated with a lot of How-to nuts 'n bolts books and little theory.

The book however is out of touch, rife with buzzwords, and is quickly losing relevancy. I was particularly irked by the essay that compares Television to the Web, arguing that all the qualities - and shortcomings - of the Web were "done first" by Television.

The author displays a kind of starry-eyed wonder at all things "new media" but the relevancy of that to professionals working in "new media" industries is debatable.