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Archive: February 2011
New Lives for Old Paper
It's difficult, perhaps impossible to imagine a designer whose eye is not drawn to ephemera — the flimsy, forgettable, never-meant-to-survive bits of two-dimensional matter that circumscribe our daily lives — and by conjecture, to paper's wondrous reincarnation in collage. Does this not make collage the most sustainable of art forms?READ MORE | COMMENTS (3)
Penny Dreadfuls
In the mid-nineteenth century, romantic cynics sent inexpensively-printed insult greetings on Valentine's Day, often labeled by profession and typically featuring a short riff on the classic four-line verse. Called Penny Dreadfuls (because they cost a penny) and sometimes referred to as "Vinegar Valentines," they were funny and mean — and because of this, were often sent anonymously.READ MORE | COMMENTS (7)
The Little Savages
A century ago, art and design juries often favored the same participants, year after year, a corruption of power that was anything but fair. Especially when jurors favored applicants made in their own image.READ MORE | COMMENTS (5)
Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director's Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.Recent Book
Scrapbooks: An American History
Jessica Helfand
Yale University Press, 2008
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DESIGN OBSERVER JOBS
JESSICA HELFAND: RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Milk, Eggs, Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and FoundBill Keaggy
The Cruel RadianceSusie Linfield
Museum of ComplaintMatthew Bakkom, editor
Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian PhotocollageElizabeth Siegel
Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental HospitalsChristopher Payne
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our LivesN. Christakis & J. Fowler
Forget Me Not: Photography and RemembranceGeoffrey Batchen
The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, with a New PrefaceMarjorie Perloff
Snapshot ChroniclesBarbara Levine & Stephanie Snyder
Extraordinary ExhibitionsRicky Jay
