Monthly Archives: May 2011

Art Center Racks Up Art Directors Club Awards

More great award news—the 2011-2012 Art Center Viewbook has won a Silver Award in the Art Directors Club 90th Annual Awards competition in the Professional Book Design category.

Judged by an international panel of the world’s most respected creative professionals, the ADC Annual Awards competition honors the best design from around the world in interactive media, broadcast and print advertising, graphic design, publication design, packaging, photography and illustration. The Viewbook will be included in the Art Directors Annual, the oldest and most respected compendium of outstanding work in the industry. The Viewbook will be on display at the awards presentation in New York and will then be included in the Art Director’s Club exhibitions that travel throughout North America, Europe, Asia and South America.

But the Viewbook wasn’t the only winner—the Safe Agua Chile book produced by Designmatters won a Merit Award in the Student Book Design and Student Motion categories, and the Cymatics exhibition garnered a Bronze Award in the Student Branding category. The Fly Title Sequence won a gold in the Student Motion category.

Congratulations to all for these well-deserved honors!

Art Center Opens Its Doors for ArtNight

Photo by Lara Warren

Save the date: ArtNight is Friday, May 20.

Enjoy a free evening of art, music and entertainment as Pasadena’s most prominent arts and cultural institutions swing open their doors.

In addition to Art Center, participants include the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena Museum of History, the Armory Center for the Arts, and many more.

Last fall, 14,000 people experienced the excitement of ArtNight—why don’t you check it out this spring? For more information, call the ArtNight Pasadena Hotline at 626.744.7887 or check out the ArtNight Pasadena website.

ArtNight Pasadena
Friday, May 20, 6-10 p.m.

The Myth of the Starving Artist

Just about every art and design student has had their pursuit of a career in the arts questioned by someone at some point in time.

© Steven A. Heller/Art Center College of Design

But a new national survey reports that graduates of arts programs are likely to find jobs and personal satisfaction, according to an article in Inside Higher Ed.

From the article:

The results of the survey, which are being released today, may offer some measure of succor to parents who are anxious about their children’s artistic aspirations.

And, while the survey may help arts programs defend against accusations that they produce an oversupply of soon-to-be-discouraged artists, they also suggest areas—particularly in the area of career preparation—in which these programs can improve.

Read more:
The Myth of the Starving Artist

The Limits of Control

Ask Art Center faculty and alumni what changes they think the next 80 years of art and design will bring, and you’ll get no shortage of compelling answers.

Autonomous cars! Augmented reality! Networked schools of fish! (No, I’m not making that last one up.)

David Erven, Dihedral Tile, detail (2008)

All topics worthy of in-depth exploration, but there’s one emerging trend that keeps kicking at the door. It’s a trend that appears across many disciplines and fulfills deep-seated human needs, ensuring it won’t be going away anytime soon.

This trend doesn’t have a name per se. It goes by many names: DIY (“Do it yourself”), hacking and open-source are just a few of its monikers. Whatever you call it, this trend represents a paradigm-shift for the creators of intellectual property.

It’s a trend where end-users are increasingly expecting more control over their products and experiences, and where creators are shifting from designing finished products to designing spaces where user-driven expression can occur.

And it’s a trend, which—although it has numerous historical antecedents—is about to explode thanks to both current technology and technology just around the bend.

Read more of this story at the DOT magazine website.

More from Syd Mead on Sentury II

Legendary visual futurist and Art Center alumnus Syd Mead stopped by Art Center last month as part of the Design Studio Press Spring Lecture Series.

Mead and his "Blade Runner" Spinner vehicle.

His lecture traversed the history of automobile design, the future of transportation, his early work for Ford and U.S. Steel, his work on Blade Runner and his latest book Sentury II.

We followed up with the designer via email to ask him about Sentury II.

Dotted Line: You mentioned in your lecture that the cover of Sentury II is intended to look like a metallic artifact that might be found in the future. What’s happening in the scene depicted in the artifact?
Mead: On the left of the spine of the book is a series of manifolds, circuitry and panels that simulate the energy feed to the image coherent side at the right (the actual cover of the book). I show a stylized, ceremonial figure just to the right of the book spine (the center of the overall artwork) and a horizontal split that reveals an energy source (heat? photon glow?) from behind the front surface of the plate combination.

At far right, just above the glowing energy source horizontal is a tableaux of figures and fixtures. One figure is entering a vehicle of some sort while behind him are a series of figures depicting a montage of social interaction, stylized foliage and geometric alignments that eventually go parallel to the outer edge of the ‘artifact.’

I imagined that this entire piece might have been dug up, cleaned off and somehow energized to bring the overall surface detail into view. The overall look of the cover art is a deliberate homage to the cover of Sentury II, which I painted first.

The cover of Sentury II

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