Senior Faculty Fellow

William Drenttel is a graphic designer, publisher, and design leader working at Winterhouse, a design firm focused on publishing, online media, and cultural institutions. Recent clients include Archives of American Art, New England Journal of Medicine, the New Yorker, University of Chicago Press, Teach for America, NYU School of Journalism, Stora Enso, Yale University, and the National Design Awards. He is also the design director of two literary foundations: Poetry Foundation and Nextbook.

From 1985 – 1997, Drenttel was the president of Drenttel Doyle Partners. Among its accomplishments, the firm changed magazine design with its design of Spy Magazine in 1986; put Martha Stewart in K-Mart; launched 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, he was a senior vice president at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising, where he launched Pampers in Italy and cellular telephones in America.

As a publisher, Drenttel has created books under the Winterhouse imprint for University of Chicago Press and Princeton Architectural Press. He is the co-editor of the five-volume series Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, published by Allworth Press, and a co-founder of DesignObserver.com, a weblog of design and cultural criticism. In 2006, he established the Winterhouse Writing Awards, a national prize for excellence in design writing and criticism.

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. He received a BA from Princeton University in 1977 with an Independent Concentration in Film and European Cultural Studies. He lives in Falls Village, Connecticut with his wife, Jessica Helfand, and their two children.