Embarrassing to admit this but I began as a soap opera writer. I learned how to write under pressure, how to work with an editor, and how to collaborate. Writing became a part of my practice after that. As an undergrad, there were only three graphic design classes you could take - beginning, intro, and advanced - and I did those all in the first year. I went back because I wanted to do things the right way.
I wanted to study design with other disciplines: I was always interested in combining design and architecture, or public health, or history and collecting, for example. Today, you can teach yourself anything from a YouTube video, so why would you spend time in class focusing on instruction?
You can look. The incubation chamber of looking and being in the studio is important, but at Yale, where we have forty-two libraries, we should really be availing ourselves of other ideas and disciplines and collections. There's a real opportunity to teach young designers how to do research and develop ideas about their own work. I went to work for a magazine designer named Roger Black. He had three of us in this tiny little room - it was graphic design boot camp.
As I recall, I redesigned fifteen magazines in about ten months. That was my first big job in editorial design and I loved it. I was in Philadelphia for three years, and then I started my own studio. A poster for an exhibit at the Wolfsonian in Miami, by Jessica Helfand. Tell me about starting your own studio.
I left the Inquirer at the end of , and started working alone. By , my husband William Drenttel and I had our first child, and shortly after, in , he left Drenttel Doyle Partners and we started a firm which later became Winterhouse. After our daughter was born in , we moved to the Berkshires, into a studio built by—and for—the man who painted the Radio City murals.
In , we moved to New Haven, because by then I had to be there more than once a week. Yale teachers and life partners Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel like to joke that fonts drew them together, but for all of their love of graphic design, their work has always been more about people than anything else. They are current graphic design chair Sheila Levrant de Bretteville M. See below. While honored individually for their careers, Drenttel and Helfand were also recognized for their collaborative work as the co-founding editors of Design Observer — a design, visual thinking, and cultural criticism weblog — and for their artistry in their design studio, Winterhouse, which the two started in Over the past decade, Drenttel has served as design director of numerous non-profit organizations, including the Poetry Foundation and Teach for All.
For the past four years, he has taught design thinking and creative strategy at Yale SOM. See full biographies for Helfand and Drenttel.
Helfand and Drenttel recently spoke with YaleNews about their honor and their careers in graphic design. An edited version of that conversation follows. How did it feel for you to win — at your still relatively young ages — the AIGA Medal for lifetime achievement? But then I thought about how great it feels to win an award for living the life I want and doing the work I care about. Today, the opposite is more likely to be true: a student who does not expand his or her approach to a project is strongly encouraged to do so.
From Nineteenth Century broadsides to Paula Scher's posters for The Public Theatre, the history of the poster is the history of modern civilization.
So why are academics so hell-bent on poster board and bad typography? Why don't they ask us for help? Or does it? Once the allegedly chilling skull and crossbones is marketed as a decorative pattern on a silk bowtie , its credibility as an mark of peril seems, well, somewhat questionable, begging the question: have we become so bored by life that we've inadvertently become inured to death?
They're out of shape and flabby, non-committal and generic — like sensible shoes, practical and monotonous and dull. Instead, Catalonia clings to a visual language that celebrates the goofy: this is a country awash in Comic Sans. When will we have enough stuff?
I call it: Absolut Boo-Boo. In those moments, it becomes a metaphor for a kind of imperiled humanity. But what about craft, we ask? And slipping we are. It's the Card's design that appears the final string that may either secure our rights as individuals or rip them apart. It means going where you have to go to get what you need. Or Madness? The New Law of Eminent Lo-Mein DIY design invading typography terrain: culture-jamming in the domains of freedom of speech, pharmaceutics, and pop-culture.
If we can't do that, we do it graphically. When all else fails, the pen isn't just mightier than the sword: it is the sword. And should it be included in the first place? The persistent evidence of impenetrable personal work in design schools across America is a serious epidemic, resulting in a kind of method designing that erroneously treats sentiment as substance.
Greer Allen died last week after a short illness. He was Cumulatively, all of his projects — which range from collecting empty pages of famous writers, to constructing parabolas in a public park, to collecting anonymous self-portraits — seem to look for ways to formally address time and space and the human condition. On the scale of true confessions, this one lies somewhere between admitting I once wrote for a soap opera and divulging my complete incapacity to recall keyboard commands in Adobe Illustrator.
But there it is: when I'm hopelessly stuck, a quick round of Destructomatch is just the ticket. To the extent that, in matters of critical care, timing is everything, why should it matter? Then again, why shouldn't it? Because when it comes to nailing design, the "Is" have it. From dressing in all blue or red to wearing "I voted today" buttons, there has been a kind of silent visual communication effort steadily in play for the last 36 hours. We need to get in those boardrooms, those war rooms, those bastions of decision-making where no designer has ever been before.
We need new legacies, better policies, richer histories for the next generation of graphic designers. Today's obituary in The New York Times alleges that he described drawing as meditative, while photography was intuitive: though certainly both activities might have been informed by a relentless need to observe and in a sense, preserve the world around him. At turns provocative and peculiar, photographs of a new building in Birmingham, England, hint at a utopian uprising: No angles.
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