About + Masthead

Contributors

Eric Baker is design director for The O Group in Manhattan, where he strategizes design for all things luxury. He is also on the faculty at The School of Visual Arts.

Ernest Beck is a New York-based freelance writer and editor.

Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Prior to joining Pentagram in 1990 as a partner in the firm's New York office, he worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates, ultimately as vice president of graphic design. Michael is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.

Andrew Blauvelt is Design Director and Curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. A practicing graphic designer, his work has received more than 100 design awards and has been profiled in such magazines as I.D., Idea, Eye, Surface, Print, and Metropolis, and has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, and the Design Museum, London, among others.

William Drenttel is a designer, publisher and design leader. Bill works in partnership with Jessica Helfand at Winterhouse, a design consultancy focused on social change and innovation, publishing and online media, and cultural and educational institutions.

Michael Erard is the author of Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Science,Wired, The Atlantic, The New Scientist, Lingua Franca, Legal Affairs, and the Texas Observer, where he is a contributing writer.

Jessica Helfand is a partner, with William Drenttel, in Winterhouse, a design studio in Northwest Connecticut. Their work focuses on publishing and editorial development; new media; and cultural, educational and literary institutions.

Steven Heller is the co-chair of the Designer as Author MFA Program and co-founder of the MFA in design criticism program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is the editor of AIGA VOICE, the online journal of design, as well as the editor, author or co-author of over 100 books on design, political art and popular culture.

Mark Lamster is a writer on the arts and culture. He is the author of Master of Shadows, a political biography of the painter Peter Paul Rubens, and is currently at work on a biography of the architect Philip Johnson. He can be found at www.marklamster.com.

Alexandra Lange is a journalist and architectural historian based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Architect's Newspaper, Metropolis, New York Magazine and The New York Times, and she teaches architecture criticism at the School of Visual Arts.

Julie Lasky was editor-in-chief of I.D. until 2009. Prior to that, she was editor-in-chief of Interiors magazine, which she led to several national honors, and managing editor of Print magazine. A widely published writer and critic, Lasky has contributed to The New York Times, Metropolis, Dwell, Eye, Slate, the National Scholar and NPR, as well as Design Observer.

Adam Harrison Levy is a writer and documentary film-maker. He recently worked on the upcoming BBC2 series, The Genius of Design and produced Selling the Sixties, a BBC documentary about consumerism, advertising and culture of the early 1960s. A version of this article first appeared in The Guardian in May 2004.

Rick Poynor founded Eye magazine in London in 1990, edited it for seven years and is now its resident columnist. He writes the "Observer" column for Print magazine and he has written about design, media and visual culture for numerous publications.

Adrian Shaughnessy is a self-taught graphic designer based in London. He spent 15 years as creative director of Intro. He left in 2004 to pursue an interest in writing and to work as a freelance consultant. Today he runs ShaughnessyWorks, a studio combining design and editorial direction.

Dmitri Siegel is the web art director for Urban Outfitters. He is also creative director of Ante, an annual publication devoted to emerging artists and writers, and Anathema, a magazine devoted to the pursuit of impossible ideas. He is on the faculty of the Art Center College of Design in the graduate program in criticism and theory.

Alice Twemlow is chair of the design criticism MFA Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York and an M-Phil/PhD candidate in the design history program at the V&A Museum and the Royal College of Art in London.

Tom Vanderbilt is a New York City-based writer on architecture, design, technology, science and other topics. He is contributing editor to I.D. and Print, and writes for a wide range of publications, including: The New York Times, Wired, The Financial Times, Smithsonian, Preservation, Slate, Metropolis, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Harvard Design Magazine, Cabinet, Artforum, and others.

Lorraine Wild is a designer and educator in Los Angeles. She established her own design practice, Green Dragon Office, in 1996 to focus on collaborations with architects, curators and publishers.

Contact and Questions

Send all questions to designobserver [at] winterhouse.com. We will make every effort to respond promptly.

DESIGN OBSERVER JOBS

Observer Omnimedia LLC

Michael Bierut
William Drenttel
Jessica Helfand

Publisher & Editorial Director

William Drenttel

Observatory Editors

Michael Bierut
William Drenttel
Jessica Helfand
Julie Lasky

Betsy Vardell, Technology Director
RubyStudio, Technology Partner

General Information

Design Observer, and its related channels, Observatory, Change Observer, Places, Observer Media and Observers Room, are owned and operated by Observer Omnimedia LLC, and are collectively referred to here as The Design Observer Group Sites. Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm is published by the Places Journal Foundation.

General comments about this site may be sent to designobserver [at] winterhouse.com.

Postal mail may be sent to Design Observer, Winterhouse, 150 Deepwoods Drive, Hamden, CT 06517-3452 USA.

All essays, comments and other content published on The Design Observer Group Sites remain the property of their authors. While reproduction of more than a reasonable excerpt without the author's permission is prohibited, by submitting any content to The Design Observer Group Sites authors give Observer Omnimedia LLC permission to republish or reprint, either online or in print, all such content.

The Design Observer Group Sites takes no responsibility for the comments posted on its sites. We encourage comments to be short and to the point, and to be courteous to others in any exchange of comments. The Design Observer Group Sites discourage comments that are off-topic, unnecessarily antagonistic or defamatory, or in violation of other's intellectual property rights. We reserve the right to edit or delete comments that do not adhere to these standards.

Copyright ©2003-2012 Observer Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Design Observer

Observatory

Featured Writers

Departments

Topics