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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 Los Angeles Times. The essays collected here decode the technologies, trends, themes, personalities, and visual phenomena that frame contemporary design theory and practice, addressing topics as far-ranging as talking Barbies, mindless manifestoes, scratchy typography, reality television, de Stijl geometry, chicken nuggets, and sex on the screen. Her first two books, Paul Rand: American Modernist and Six (+2) Essays on Design and New Media, became instant classics in the field. This new compilation looks critically at "the new media" and provides a road map of things to come. Designers, students, educators, visual literati, and anyone else looking for an entertaining and insightful guide to the world of design today will not find a better or a more approachable book.

This book was designed at the Winterhouse Studio, Falls Village, Connecticut, by William Drenttel and Kevin Smith. The typeface used is Thesis, designed by Luc(as) de Groot in 1994. 8 x 5.25 inches. 2001. Published by Princeton Architectural Press.

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...discover informed, sensitive, and energetic thinking about contemporary visual culture. Helfand offers views of an individual who experiences her subject while playing several roles -- designer, writer, critic, teacher, citizen, friend, mother. This robust, wide-roaming consideration of design is one part that makes Screen such a rewarding book.
Tim Rich,Print,September/October 2003

Helfand offers an insightful, provocative look at a wide-ranging design world.
I.D. Magazine, April 2002

Designers who write about other designers are a rare breed. Rarer still are those who write well. Helfand is just such a rarity. As both a precise, jargon-free analysis of the history of 20th century design and an insightful guide to its progress in the 21st, Helfand's third book is a collection of some of her sharpest observations on modern visual culture.
The Face, December 1, 2001

Jessica Helfand is a rare thing: an extraordinary designer who writes well. Her insights on design, it's history, its practice, and the ways its being affected by new technologies are important reading for any serious designer.
Hugh Dubberly, Principal, DDG

Writers on technology and design seem to fall in two categories: dreamy aphoristic visionaries or incomprehensible jargon-spouting nerds. Jessica Helfand is neither. Her writing is graceful, vivid and down-to-earth. She is a thoughtful assessor of design in the 20th century, and an indispensable guide to how we will communicate in the 21st.
Michael Bierut, Partner, Pentagram

This collection of essays capture the essence and the concerns designers must face in dealing with a techno-bias world. What knowledge from the past is relevant and important to bring forth? What hinders us from moving forward? Provocative questions on aesthetics and assumptions are raised with this intelligent compilation. This is an invaluable fuel for the mind that will inform and guide any and all design endeavors.
Clement Mok, President, Board of Director's AIGA

Jessica Helfand is an intelligent writer who does not have to show off how intelligent she is, which makes her incredibly intelligent.
Stefan Sagmeister, graphic designer

Jessica Helfand has taken the highest expectations the design profession has for itself in solving problems of communication with text and images and gone one step further—she has demonstrated the ability to use language alone to bring clarity to issues facing design. Jessica's ability to observe carefully and see clearly; consider context and audience; and then craft her writing adroitly, with grace and style is nearly unparalleled in critical design writing today. In these essays, she has applied this finesse for the benefit of us all, as she addresses issues historic, social and very current.
Richard Grefé, Executive Director, AIGA

These insightful essays form one of the first significant books dedicated specifically to critical issues in interactive electronic communications design. In a very new field that continually changes at the speed of light, design educators will find this book insightful and reflective, one of the few sources to focus specifically on the design of new media. These essays are insightful and challenging, yet very readable and accessible. As graphic design educators reach to develop appropriate courses for this super-heated new communications media, they will find these essays give an important historical, cultural and professional context to this technologically-driven field. This provocative book introduces key issues that are very important to my course on Interactive Typography.
Katherine McCoy,Senior Lecturer, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology

"I never thought of it that way" is a phrase that occurs frequently in one's mind reading these provocative essays. Ms. Helfand is thoughtful about the subject of design but manages to be entertaining at the same time.
Milton Glaser, Principal MCD

Jessica Helfand writes about design the way M.F.K. Fisher wrote about food and Randall Jarrell wrote about poetry. Not only is she knowledgeable, canny, eloquent, brimming with provocative opinions and classical good sense; she is also an exceptional practitioner of the very thing she so keenly observes. Plus, she lives in one of the most astonishing modernist houses I've ever seen. Come to think of it, I hate her.
Chip Kidd, Knopf

Jessica Helfand writes with an original voice and an open mind, avoiding the hype, debunking the myths, inviting us to consider new and unusual ways to think about design and new media.
Red Burns, Chair, Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

Jessica Helfand is one of design's most thoughtful essayists; she elevates the young field of design criticism through well-reasoned analysis, respect for history, and approachable writing. "Screen" shows Helfand's ability to penetrate the flashy veneer of new media to reveal deeper insights about design and the production of culture. This book will stay on design students' reference lists long after the course is over.
Meredith Davis, Professor and Chair, graphic design, North Carolina State University

In these bi-, tri-, and quadri-furcated times, with specialists burrowing themselves in niches and narrowcasting to their own navels, Jessica Helfand strides across the landscape as that rarest of creatures: a designer who can write. Make that a writer who can design. However parsed, she joins a select group – including Paul Rand and the Eameses – who have been able to explain the visible world, even as they create it. In these post-postmodern times, Helfand is a throwback: a renaissance woman.
Randall Rothenberg, Chief Marketing Officer, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, and media columnist, Ad Age

If "reading is your ticket to the world," this book is your ticket to the design world. Sub-text, context . . . great text.
Tucker Viemeister, Industrial Designer

Jessica Helfand's essays on digital media find the nexus of design and popular culture in a manner unique in contemporary design criticism. Her spirited prose and lucid insights contribute a new dimension to the often confounding world of virtual space.
Steven Heller, Editor, The Education of an E-Designer, Senior Art Director of the New York Times

From "real time" to "virtual space," the core clichés of digital media are elegantly but relentlessly challenged in Jessica Helfand's Screen essays. Unexamined buzz-concepts like "personalization" burst into flame under her scrutiny. What we are left with are some really juicy questions. Helfand's provocations suggest ways to explore the immense possibilities that lie beneath the surface glibness of "new" media.
Brenda Laurel,Graduate Faculty, Art Center College of Design; Author of Utopian Entrepreneur

Jessica Helfand's essays will open your eyes and sharpen your critical understanding. They grow out of careful, sensitive reflection on the everyday practices of graphic design and new media. They don't peddle a flashy general theory, but offer subtle analysis and nuanced insights derived from long, engaged experience.
William J. Mitchell

Jessica Helfand is one of the most clear-headed, incisive writers working today in the amorphous area of "cyber research." In place of grand abstractions and utopian pronouncements, she offers solid criticism grounded in the philosophical, social, and aesthetic implications of new media. She understands the details and grasps the fundamental challenges they pose to old ways of thinking about typography and communication.
Ellen Lupton, Curator, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, and Chair, Department of Graphic Design, Maryland Institute College of Art

The design challenge is, how do you make a book that feels like it was designed as a very considerate artifact, but the writing is left intact?
STEP inside design, March/April 2003

Awards
2002 I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review
2002 Print Magazine Annual Design Review

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