Monthly Archives: November 2012

Students craft art from fallen trees to raise funds

Art Center students have turned fallen trees into art as part of the “Forces of Nature” project on display through Sunday at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden.

The exhibit features woodworks from 130 artists that will be sold during a silent auction to raise funds for the Arboretum and replant trees. Each piece was crafted from a piece of fallen wood from last December’s windstorm that toppled 235 trees at the Arboretum.

Sixteen students in Fridolin Beisert’s Creative Strategies class were given a 6-inch slice of wood and two weeks to craft a piece.

“The challenge was to create something in a short amount of time that would sell for the highest amount,” said Beisert, a professor in the Product Design department.

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Students design cars around engine, win scholarships

From left: "Top Gear" host Tanner Foust, Bruno Gallardo, JJ Hwang discuss Gallardo’s design for a full-size pickup at LA Auto Show.

Art Center students’ car concepts won top honors Wednesday at EcoMotors Future Design Challenge, from a paired-down pick-up to a “Brosome” dad wagon.

The Michigan-based company challenged more than 20 students from Detroit’s College for Creative Studies and Art Center to design a concept around its unusual engine. The OPOC (opposed piston, opposed cylinder) delivers 12- to-15-percent better efficiency than conventional piston engines but looks like nothing else under the hood.

Students were challenged to create a vehicle around the engine’s wider and shorter shape, and winners in three categories — mid-size sedan, full-size pickup and emerging-market vehicle — were announced at the L.A. Auto Show. Here are Art Center students’ winning designs.

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Designmatters UNFPA campaign wins top Spark Award


This past spring, students in a Graphic Design Department-hosted Designmatters studio were challenged to create an integrated campaign for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to advocate for young people’s rights to health, education, protection, respect and participation in decision-making for their future.

Not only did the students meet that challenge with aplomb with “We Are Youth,” their campaign which premiered this past summer at Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, but now their work has also won a top honor at the annual Spark Design Awards.

The “We Are Youth” campaign—designed by students Pamela Abolian, Brett Beynon, Kenneth Chan, Andrew Chen, Lisa Chen, Ka Kit Cheong, Daniel Choi, Il Chan Chun, Heather Grates, Crystal Kim, Kevin Lam, Esther Park, Jerod Rivera, Lamson To and Hyunsun Yoo—won the Spark Awards’ highest honor, the Spark!, in the competition’s Communications student category.

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Alums’ airport installation takes shape from flight

‘Tis the season for travel — and those who find themselves in Atlanta’s International Airport can find an artsy take on flight.

AirFIELD — designed by alums Dan Goods and Jamie Barlow, and graphic design chair Nik Hafermaas — mimics the flight paths of one of the world’s busiest hubs.

The liquid-crystal sculpture suspended from the ceiling is synced to real-time flight data and quietly ripples with each passing plane — up to 2,500 a day.

The installation’s 1,500 discs are connected to 81 circuit boards and a server, and switch from opaque to transparent with an electric charge. Planes traveling short distances create small movements while longer flights cause greater activity in the sculpture.

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Production Designer, alum Patrick Hanenberger behind ‘Rise of the Guardians’ look and feel

Even if you’ve missed all the great stories in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, you’ve no doubt heard that DreamWorks Animation’s latest film Rise of the Guardians—which takes childhood fantasy figures like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and reimagines them as mythological heroes in an epic fantasy adventure—comes out in theaters Wednesday, Nov. 21.

And right in the middle of all that legendary action is the film’s production designer, Art Center’s own Patrick Hanenberger, who graduated from the College in 2003 with a degree in Transportation Design and is currently teaching a Visual Communication course.

We recently caught up with Hanenberger to ask him about his role in Guardians, how he ended up working in animation and which lessons from Art Center have stuck with him.

Dotted Line: First of all, how did you go from being a Transportation Design student to a production designer for animated films?

Patrick Hanenberger: I studied Transportation Design at Art Center and it taught me problem solving, 3D modeling, sculpting, sketching, designing around the human figure, rendering, research and most importantly presentation. These are all skills I use on a daily basis and are universal in any kind of design field. I always knew I wanted to work in movies and animated movies are great for designers since every single little detail needs to be designed and modeled. During Art Center I developed my portfolio to be very content based, which meant I always designed my vehicles for a specific story. After graduation I got a job as a visual development artist and from there on over the last eight years worked my way up to become production designer.

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Art Center announces Alumni Award winners

Art Center is proud to announce the Alumni Award winners in the categories of lifetime achievement, outstanding service and young innovator. The annual honors allow Art Center to publicly recognize the talent, service and design influence of our alumni. Awards will be presented at the Fall Graduation ceremony Dec. 15 at 4 p.m.

Bruce Burdick ENVL 61: Lifetime Achievement Alumni Award

Bruce Burdick at Art Center in 1961

Bruce Burdick’s credits include designs for Charles and Ray Eames, John Follis and Herb Rosenthal. The flexible office furniture Burdick designed for Herman Miller was named Time magazine’s the Best of 1981 for Industrial Design.

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VIDEO: Car Classic – 90 years of design in 90 seconds.



Art Center recently celebrated 90 years of design — from the 1924 Rolls Royce to the 2012 Fisker Karma — at Car Classic 2012.

The annual event, held Oct. 21, drew a crowd of 1,500 and featured colorful all-American classics, French Citroens, and a progression of cars built for speed, from a Corvette Stingray (designed by alums Pete Brock and Larry Shindoa) to the 2011 McLaren (designed by alum Frank Stephenson).

A section of the event — a ‘61 Cadillac Coupe, ‘88 Fiero, ‘64 Corvair Monza Coupe and a ‘58 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz Coupe — was dedicated to designs by Ron Hill, an Art Center alum and former chair of transportation design. Hill also received the Lifetime Achievement award for his 30-year career that spanned Corvettes, Camaros and Cadillacs.

The College also gave out 25 awards in three categories, including audience and designers’ picks. Click here to see who was best in show.

Tesla snags top Motor Trend, Popular Science honors

Tesla Motors’ Model S sedan might be the best thing on four wheels.

Designed by Art Center alum Franz von Holzhausen, the battery-powered sedan this week was named Motor Trend magazine’s 2013 car of the year and topped the Popular Science “Best of What’s New” list.

The family-size sedan beat out some high-power competition — BMW’s new 3-Series, Honda’s revamped Accord and Toyota’s 2013 Lexus GS — to become the first electric car to earn the Motor Trend honor.

“It is a testament not only to the luxury sedan and electric car segment, but to American engineering overall,” said Edward Loh, editor-in-chief of Motor Trend. “To be the first car in the 64-year history of the award to be powered by something other than gasoline must mean it is very special.”

Popular Science gave the Model S the grand prize ahead of on- and off-wheel innovations in the auto category – from Ferrari’s fastest car, the 730-horsepower F12 Berlinetta, to MyLink, which integrates a smartphone into the dashboard.

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Graphic Design student wins Adobe Design Achievement Award

Recent graduate Jeff Han GRPH 11 (top) and current Graphic Design student Jerod Rivera represented Art Center at last week's Adobe Design Achievement Awards.

Recent Graphic Design graduate Jeff Han GRPH 11 walked away a winner at last week’s 12th annual Adobe Design Achievement Awards.

The event, which was held at the DesignThinkers 2012 conference in Toronto, honored students and educators whose winning projects were selected from 41 finalists out of nearly 5,000 total entries from 70 countries.

Han’s museum re-branding project for the fictional Contemporary Museum of Architecture (COMA), which he created as a seventh term student in instructor Brad Bartlett’s Transmedia course, won the award in the the Print Communications category.

“I’ve always had a very strong interest in architecture,” said Han of his winning design, which utilized a typographic solution inspired by the generative creation of forms in contemporary architecture. Part of the rebranding project included creating a series of posters promoting an (also fictional) exhibition by Greg Lynn, an architect whom Han lists as a creative inspiration.

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Survey: Art Center ranks No. 1 for industrial design

Art Center’s industrial design graduate and undergraduate programs have ranked No. 1 by the Design Futures Council in its DesignIntelligence survey of America’s best architecture and design schools.

Additionally, DesignIntelligence named Integrated Studies instructor Randall Wilson among the 30 Most Admired Educators for 2013.

Art Center’s undergraduate industrial design programs — which include Product Design, Environmental Design, Transportation Design and Entertainment Design — were praised for teaching students communication, computer applications and design.

Deans and department heads surveyed said they most admired Art Center’s Graduate Industrial Design program, “For its forward-looking focus on the role of design in business and research.”

Art Center’s industrial design undergraduate program has ranked No. 1 in the survey since 2006, while the graduate program has ranked in the top three during the same time.

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