30 CONVERSATIONS ON DESIGN

JESSICA HELFAND // Graphic Designer, Educator, Writer, Theorist, 2010 Series

HIGHER LEARNING

Jessica Helfand

Graphic Designer Jessica Helfand states that she learns from her students because their perspectives continue to change. Helfand goes on to make the point that in the future, design program and educators need to think seriously about how they can train their students to engage in bigger broader unforeseen problems in a world that isn’t just the immediate domain that we inhabit. As students and as practitioners it’s much, much bigger – more global issue at stake.

According to Helfand, the single example of design inspires her would have to be her students; because they are always changing and growing and looking at the world in ways that she can’t. They are always informing each other and themselves and know about what matters in design – and what matters in design keeps changing.  She believes it’s not a static question and that it certainly can’t have a static response.

KHOI VINH // Design Director, NYTimes.com,  2010 Series

DEFINING OUR LIVES

According to Design Director, Khoi Vinh, the Internet is an example of design that inspires

Khoi Vinh

him most because it’s so organic and by the time we really understand what the Internet means in our lives, it will have transformed everything around us.

Designers have to stop existing in the mode of just selling things and they need to transform themselves into the maker of things. For a long time graphic design has been about marketing and selling and being deceptive so that things can be sold to consumers. That’s not the future of the design profession, going forward, design is going to be more about making things and really trying to use the values and discipline of design to create better products and experiences from the core for audiences and users around the world.

JOE DUFFY // Duffy & Partners, 2009 Series

ALL NATURAL

Joe Duffy

One of the first brand projects that Joe Duffy of Duffy & Partners worked on was the Classico product, over 25 years ago. The solution was to create illustration from nature.  Chuck Anderson took old steel engravings and redesigned and illustrated them, incorporating natural colors to speak to the whole idea of a handmade family recipe coming from nature.

“Our work is so eclectic that it’s so hard to point to just one example of design that inspires,” laments Duffy. If you think of design on a much broader scale such as the design of nature, then that’s probably the thing that has inspired the work that Duffy has done over the past 25 years.