Image by: Andy Bosselman
Name: Steven Heller
Date of Birth: 7th July 1950
Alma Mater: None
Steven Heller is an American art director, journalist, and author who specializes in topics related to graphic design.
Steven Heller was born in New York City to Bernice and Milton Heller. Unlike many of his peers, Heller has no official qualifications or training in art or graphic design. When he began working as art director of the New York Free Press in 1968, he often utilised his press pass to gain access to local lectures. According to graphic designer Paula Scher, Heller did not care much about what could be categorized as graphic design during his first few years at the New York Free Press. He instead chose to focus on illustration content rather than the actual design until colleague Brad Holland convinced him otherwise.
Heller’s interest in design increased exponentially during the 1980s when he met graphic designers Seymour Chwast and Louise Fili. It was around this time that he had begun working as editor of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) Journal of Graphic Design. Heller and Fili are now married. He seems secretive about his early life and family background, but he does have one son, Nicolas Heller.
Heller’s expertise first came to prominence in 1974 when he became the art director for The New York Times Op-Ed page. His interest in illustration employed on the Op-Ed page led him to publish collections on the subject. He then became the art director of The New York Times Book Review in 1977.
“Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages.”
Steven Heller
Heller is author and co-author of many works on the history of illustration, typography, and many subjects related to graphic design. He has published more than eighty titles and written articles for magazines including Affiche, Baseline, Creation, Design Issues, Design Observer, Eye, Graphis, The New York Times Book Review, and U&lc magazine, a publication devoted to typography where Heller spent over thirty as a senior art director. In addition to his publication work, Heller has written, co-authored, and/or edited more than 130 books about design and popular culture. More than 20 of those books were for Chronicle Books with his wife, Louise Fili.
In 1984, Heller helped create the master’s program for illustration at the School of Visual Arts. Then, in 2008 Heller co-founded the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Design Criticism program with Alice Twemlow. The program became popularly known as D-Crit and was created to help non-designers find a place in the design field.