William Drenttel

FALLS VILLAGE — Longtime Falls Village resident William Drenttel, an award-winning graphic designer and publisher who was the co-founder of the influential blog Design Observer, died Dec. 21, 2013, at Connecticut Hospice in Branford, Conn., after a long illness.Drenttel was the president of Winterhouse Institute, Vice President of communications and design for Teach For All, co-director of the Transform Symposium at the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation and the recipient of Rockefeller Foundation support to develop models for design and social change. A former president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, he was a fellow of the New York University Institute of the Humanities, a senior faculty fellow at Yale School of Management; a longtime trustee of Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and a vice president of the Susan Sontag Literary Foundation. With his wife, Jessica Helfand, Drenttel was elected to the Art Directors Hall of Fame and the Alliance Graphique Internationale. Together, Helfand and Drenttel were the first Henry Wolf Residents in Graphic Design at the American Academy in Rome. Earlier this year, they were each recipients of the the AIGA Medal.Drenttel was born in 1953 in Minneapolis and grew up in Southern California. A 1977 graduate of Princeton University, he spent eight years as a senior vice president and management supervisor at Saatchi & Saatchi ComptonWorldwide. During this time he managed more than 20 different Procter & Gamble brands in the U.S., Canada and Italy. As a management director, he provided strategic leadership in the packaged goods, fast food and telecommunications categories, managing the launch of Procter & Gamble Pampers in Italy in 1980 and the AT&T account that launched cellular telephones in America in 1983. In 1984, after the breakup of AT&T, Drenttel won and managed the cellular telephone advertising accounts for two of the regional Bell operating companies, Ameritech and Pacific Telesis. His four years of international experience at Saatchi & Saatchi included one year managing P&G Canada accounts and three years as a managing director of Saatchi & Saatchi Italy, during which time agency billings and staff increased five-fold.From 1985 to 1997, Drenttel was president of Drenttel Doyle Partners, a design company that worked in a wide range of areas, including corporate design, new product development, package design, collateral materials and advertising, marketing consultation, architectural and environmental graphics and editorial design. Among its accomplishments, DDP made a significant impact on magazine design with its design of Spy magazine and The New Republic in 1986; designed the identity for the World Financial Center in1988; launched retail cash machines for Citibank in 1992; repositioned the Cooper-Hewitt Museum as the National Design Museum in 1995; designed Martha Stewart products into K-Mart in 1997; and created graphic identity programs for three national educational institutions: Teach for America in 1994, Edison Project in 1994 and Princeton University in 1996.In 1997, Drenttel formed Winterhouse with Helfand. Winterhouse is a graphic design consultancy studio focused on publishing and online media, cultural and educational institutions, and design and social innovation. From its rural location in northwest Connecticut, Drenttel sought to create a new kind of design practice that innovated how designers participate in large social issues and programs, both nationally and internationally. Winterhouse Studio initially focused on publishing and editorial development; new media; and cultural, educational and literary institutions. Drenttel’s publishing imprint, Winterhouse Editions, published works by Paul Auster, Thomas Bernhard, Michael Bierut, Paul Celan, Gloria Feldt, Jessica Helfand, William Helfand, Siri Hustvedt, Hans Erich Nossack, James Salter, Susan Sontag, Leon Wieseltier and Hanns Zischler.In 2006, Drenttel established Winterhouse Institute with the intent to focus on nonprofit projects that support design innovation and education, as well as social and political initiatives. One of its first initiatives — The Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism — was formed to increase the understanding of design, both within the profession and throughout American life. A collaboration with AIGA, the $10,000 award (along with additional $1,000 student prizes) recognized excellence in writing about design and encouraged the development of new young voices. Later that year, in collaboration with AIGA, Drenttel launched The Polling Place Photo Project — a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism to capture democracy in action by archiving photographs taken by citizens at their respective polling places on election days — before the mid-term elections (in collaboration with AIGA). For the 2008 elections, the project was supported by The New York Times as a part of its political coverage, with photos appearing on the paper’s homepage on Election Day, Nov. 11, 2008. In total, more than 4,000 photographs were submitted from all 50 states, as well as overseas polling places. Winterhouse Institute was awarded a $1.5 million grant by the Rockefeller Foundation in late 2008, supporting a three-year project to develop collective action and collaboration for social impact across the design industries.In October 2003, Drenttel — along with Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand and Rick Poynor — founded Design Observer, which became the leading international site for design, urbanism, social innovation and cultural observation, providing a forum for critical discussion and commentary. From 2007 to 2011, Drenttel taught design communications and strategic thinking at Yale School of Management, where he was a senior enterprise fellow in the Program in Social Entrepreneurship. During this period, he used Rockefeller Foundation funding to start and support the Case Study Project in Design and Social Innovation.In addition to his wife, Jessica Helfand, he is survived by their two children, Malcolm and Fiona; a brother, Bradley, and his children; a stepmother, Maryon Drenttel, and her children; and his father-in-law, William Helfand.