Design history · Studio
Winterhouse
The Connecticut studio that bound design practice to writing, criticism, and social good.
Winterhouse was founded in 1997 by William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand inside a 1932 painting studio in Falls Village, Connecticut — the rural workspace of Ezra Winter, whose murals decorated Radio City Music Hall and whose building gave the practice its name. From there, Drenttel and Helfand built something that resisted the conventional studio category: a graphic design practice, a publishing house (Winterhouse Editions), a critical platform, and, from 2006, the Winterhouse Institute, a non-profit that ran the Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing and Criticism in collaboration with AIGA. In October 2003, together with Michael Bierut and Rick Poynor, they co-founded Design Observer, which became a leading forum for design criticism and commentary. The studio designed the identity of the newly established Poetry Foundation and art-directed nearly a hundred covers of Poetry magazine from April 2005. William Drenttel died on 21 December 2013; Jessica Helfand closed the studio shortly after. The Institute continues.
Design history · Studio
Winterhouse
The Connecticut studio that bound design practice to writing, criticism, and social good.
Winterhouse was founded in 1997 by William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand inside a 1932 painting studio in Falls Village, Connecticut — the rural workspace of Ezra Winter, whose murals decorated Radio City Music Hall and whose building gave the practice its name. From there, Drenttel and Helfand built something that resisted the conventional studio category: a graphic design practice, a publishing house (Winterhouse Editions), a critical platform, and, from 2006, the Winterhouse Institute, a non-profit that ran the Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing and Criticism in collaboration with AIGA. In October 2003, together with Michael Bierut and Rick Poynor, they co-founded Design Observer, which became a leading forum for design criticism and commentary. The studio designed the identity of the newly established Poetry Foundation and art-directed nearly a hundred covers of Poetry magazine from April 2005. William Drenttel died on 21 December 2013; Jessica Helfand closed the studio shortly after. The Institute continues.
Key facts
- Founded
- 1997, Falls Village, Connecticut
- Named for
- Ezra Winter's 1932 painting studio — Radio City Music Hall muralist
- Founders
- William Drenttel (14 Oct 1953 – 21 Dec 2013) and Jessica Helfand
- Key initiatives
- Winterhouse Editions · Winterhouse Institute (est. 2006, 501c3 from 2011) · Design Observer (co-founded October 2003)
- Awards
- AIGA Medal 2013 · ADC Hall of Fame 2010
Key works & examples
Poetry Foundation identity and Poetry magazine redesign
2005
In April 2005, William Drenttel — serving as creative director of the newly-established Poetry Foundation from 2004 to 2008 — launched a full redesign of Poetry magazine with Winterhouse designers including Alexander Knowlton. The new masthead set the title in all-caps Gill Sans, permitted to change colour against a white ground to complement the cover artwork. A more elegant version of the Pegasus, Poetry's historical mascot drawn by Eric Gill in the 1930s, was redrawn as part of the larger identity system. Each cover commissioned a different contemporary illustrator — Henrik Drescher for the first issue, Maira Kalman for the 2006 Humour Issue, and more than ninety others through 2017. For the magazine's centennial in 2012, Winterhouse invited leading designers and illustrators to produce their own versions of the Pegasus for the anniversary issues. The collaboration between Winterhouse and the Poetry Foundation lasted twelve years, from April 2005 to June 2017.
Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture
2001
Published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2001 with an introduction by John Maeda, Screen collects twenty-three essays by Jessica Helfand written between 1994 and 2001 for publications including Eye, Print, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times. The essays address the emerging visual culture of networked computing: avatars, electronic typography, the cult of the scratchy, sensory montage, the death of hierarchy. The book's own design — dark teal ground, yellow-green colon-led text, a typographic system that treats page furniture as content — embodies the argument it makes about the screen as a designed surface. It was one of the first critical volumes to address digital visual culture from inside the graphic design profession, and remains a reference in design writing courses. A copy is held in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.
Polling Place Photo Project
2006
In 2006, William Drenttel and the Winterhouse Institute launched the Polling Place Photo Project in collaboration with AIGA — an experiment in civic journalism that invited voters to photograph where they cast their ballots. All images were submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives licence. For the 2006 midterm elections and the 2008 presidential election, more than 4,000 photographs arrived from all fifty states and overseas polling places. The 2008 project was supported by The New York Times, whose homepage carried project photographs on election night as Barack Obama was elected President. The project used design as a tool for civic observation rather than communication — asking what American democracy looks like at the precise moment of participation. It is among the clearest examples of what Drenttel called designing for social innovation: practice that enlarges the public record rather than a client's brand.