William Drenttel

Blogger, Concerned citizen, Consultant, Designer, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Marketer, Parent, Web guru, Writer/Editor

William Drenttel is a graphic designer, publisher and design leader. William Drenttel works in partnership with Jessica Helfand at Winterhouse, a design studio focusing on publishing, online media and non-profit institutions. Recent clients include Archives of American Art, Errol Morris, New England Journal of Medicine, Teach For America, The New Yorker, Yale School of Management, Harvard Law School, Samsung, Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and the National Design Awards. Drenttel is currently the design director of two large non-profit initiatives: Poetry Foundation and Teach For All. In 2009-2010, Drenttel is the recipient of a $1.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to lead an initiative around design and social innovation. In 2002, Drenttel co-founded Design Observer, a web blog of design and cultural criticism: today, the site is the largest design publication in the world. He is co-editor of Below the Fold:, a journal of visual culture, and the founder of the Polling Place Photo Project, an online election documentation project supported by AIGA and The New York Times for the 2008 election cycle. In 2006, Drenttel co-founded the Winterhouse Writing Awards, a $10,000 prize for innovation in design writing and cultural criticism. Drenttel is also a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management where he teaches design thinking to future business leaders. Drenttel has been awarded a Residency at the American Academy in Rome for 2010. Drenttel is president emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, a trustee of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Susan Sontag Foundation, and a fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU. As a publisher, Drenttel has created books under the Winterhouse imprint for Yale University Press, University of Chicago Press and Princeton Architectural Press. He is the co-editor of the Looking Closer anthologies, the widely taught textbook series of critical design writings. He is a previous board member of Lingua Franca and the Poetry Society of America, and has lectured at the Library of Congress, Walker Art Center, Annenberg Public Policy Center, Cranbrook Academy of Art, San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, and two AIGA national biennial conferences, as well as in England, Slovenia, Czech Republic and Portugal. From 1985 – 1997, Drenttel was the president of Drenttel Doyle Partners, one of the leading design firms in America with over 300 design awards. Among its accomplishments, the studio changed magazine design with its design of Spy Magazine; put Martha Stewart in K-Mart; launched retail cash machines for Citibank; designed the identity for the World Financial Center; repositioned the Cooper-Hewitt Museum as the National Design Museum; and created graphic identity programs for three national educational institutions, Teach for America, Edison Project and Princeton University. Previously, from 1977 - 1985, Drenttel was a senior vice president at Saatchi & Saatchi, where he launched Pampers in Italy and cellular telephones in America. Drenttel is a graduate of Princeton University. He lives in Falls Village, Connecticut with his wife, Jessica Helfand, and their two children, Malcolm and Fiona.

Citizen Journalism, Graphic Design