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

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, 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. Included as well is an introduction by John Maeda. 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. Jessica Helfand is on the graduate faculty at Yale School of Art, is a contributing editor to Eye and ID magazines, and is a partner with William Drenttel in Winterhouse Studio in northwest Connecticut.