Author Archives: Jered Gold

ENERGY Extended Through Jan. 23

Due to popular demand, ENERGY has extended its run. It will remain on display at the Williamson Gallery through Jan. 23.

ENERGY investigates how natural forces shape not only material things, but affect our emotions and intellect.

Don’t miss the closing reception later this week, Thursday, Jan. 13 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Check out an ENERGY installation by artist (and Grad Art alumna) Rebeca Méndez in the video below:

If you haven’t already seen the exhibit, stop by the Williamson Gallery and check it out. The gallery is open Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. and Fridays noon to 9 p.m.

Read what others are saying about ENERGY:

Next Big Thing: The Lumi Process

Brand X wrote a great cover story this week on Art Center Product Design students Jesse Genet and Stéphan Angoulvant and their studio Lumi Co. The pair created a new form of printing onto materials, which they call the Lumi Process.

The cutting-edge technology allows the printing of vivid, photo-like images onto natural materials such as denim, wood and leather without the use of chemicals—something never before done in the world of design.

From the article: “Lumi Co.’s first products — a supple leather wallet printed with an image of the Brewery’s neighboring warehouses and a laptop bag featuring a 1960s Richard Avedon print — might not appear to be anything innovative. After all, photography and design have a history of playing off each other. But what makes their technique unique is that the image is ingrained in the fiber, meaning materials like pleather do not have to be used to display a print.”

Also interesting: Lumi Co got its start last year with funds raised on Kickstarter. Genet explains the process in the video below.

Read more: Lumi Co.’s photographic furniture design

Schureman Book Profiled

As you know, Product Design alum and faculty member Frido Beisert has created a beautiful book, To Draw Is to See, of the work of the late Norm Schureman. It’s currently available for purchase online at Blurb, and it’s beautifully done. Beisert has explained that by using the online publisher Blurb (rather than involving a printing company), all proceeds go to Schureman’s two sons.

And even better—Blurb named To Draw Is to See book of the week last week!

From the Blurb blog: “Every once in a while, a book comes along that reminds us how very powerful the act of honoring one’s story by making a book can be. To Draw Is to See is such a book.”

They interview Beisert on Schureman, creativity and how to tell your own story.

Beisert on Norm: “Norm was all about being creative and helping others, and we very much hope that this book will help inspire the artists and designers of the future to start creating. I often tell my students that the difference between a creative and a non-creative person is that the creative one creates. It is that simple. By doing we expose ourselves to learning and by learning we improve automatically.”

It’s a great interview—take a look. Read more: Book of the Week: To Draw Is to See

Not Another Year in Review

The following post was written by Vice President and Director of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo for the Designmatters blog.

As I sit down to write the final blog entry of the year, I am making a conscious decision to resist compiling another trite “year in review” about what we have been up to with Designmatters at Art Center. The truth is that the collective milestones we hit this year are many in number, vast in scope, and often pretty extraordinarily consequential in impact. When I run through a mental log of individual student journeys, staff, faculty and alumni accomplishments, presentations, publications, exhibitions, and project outcomes implemented with our partner organizations, I am quickly overwhelmed and humbled by the sheer power and complexity of it all.

William Ismael, Education for All, detail of poster for UNESCO, 2008

What dwells on, as I look forward to the year to come, are two key and interrelated concepts that were ubiquitous throughout the year, and in turn inform everything we are about: optimism and relevance. As I attempt to anticipate what new opportunities we might embrace, and what challenges we might fence off, these come up again and again.

Optimism–which is an idea so deeply entrenched in the definition of design itself–I always like to refer to Herbert Simon’s profoundly significant framing of design in The Sciences of the Artificial: “devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” And relevance–which is a concept so influential when you are striving to drive educational projects that are imbued with both at once a pedagogical and social impact mission.

I was taken by an insightful editorial in a recent issue of The Economist about globalization, titled “The Redistribution of Hope,” that canvassed some of the major forces at work in the world today. It captures how “optimism is on the move—with important consequences for the hopeful and the hopeless” and goes on to expose how much more vital it is turning out to be in emerging economies where it challenges the status quo, rather than in our more cushioned “first world” societies. The piece includes a testimonial by Nandan Nilekani who now heads India’s government technology committee and was the inspiring chairman of Infosys. He comments on the greatest achievement of his company being not that of producing technology but “redefining the boundaries of the possible.”

Here’s to us all having the strength and courage to pursue that impetus of shattering boundaries in 2011.

Certainly for us with Designmatters at the college the stakes are high: we are entering into the tenth year of this College-wide program, we are embarking into the first full year of granting our undergraduate students the option to pursue a course of study for the Designmatters Concentration in Art and Design for Social Impact, and we will welcome the 1st and early cohort of students for the new Media Design Matters Track MA by fall. So here’s also to optimism, full-on!

Happy Holidays from Art Center!


Happy Holidays from Art Center! We hope you have a happy and safe holiday season. Check out our beautiful holiday greeting, designed by Graphic Design students Jason Yeh and Nadia Tzuo.

For Art Center, 2011 will be a pivotal year, culminating in a year’s worth of preparation and resolve. Under the leadership of our president Lorne Buchman, and in conjunction with our 80th anniversary, the Art Center community came together this year to envision what our future will look like. Early next year, we will unveil the College’s new strategic plan, building on a long tradition of preparing art and design students to become leaders in their chosen fields.

We hope you will join us as we embark upon the next 80 years.

Our campus and administrative offices will be closed beginning Dec. 23 and will reopen Jan. 3. Happy Holidays!

Graduation and Grad Show Tomorrow!

Tomorrow is Fall Term 2010 graduation!

Photo by Lara Warren

Join us as we welcome the newest graduates into the Art Center family, and check out the work of graduating students afterwards at Graduation Show. Can’t join us at Hillside Campus tomorrow? Watch our live online webcast.

 After graduation, check out the work of the newest Art Center graduates at Graduation Show from 6 to 9 p.m. at Hillside Campus.

Fall 2010 Graduation
Saturday, December 18, 4 p.m. PST
Hillside Campus

Catching Up With Syd Mead

As the buzz around Tron: Legacy reaches a fever pitch leading up to its opening this weekend, our thoughts naturally turn to the original Tron and our beloved alumnus Syd Mead, whose designs are synonymous with the groundbreaking film.

A 1959 Transportation Design graduate, Mead is best known for his work on Tron, Bladerunner and Aliens, as well as for the creation of the V’Ger for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Mead

We caught up with Mead this week to find out what he’s been up to, and his thoughts on the new Tron.

Dotted Line: You’ve been busy. Tell us about your latest projects.
Syd Mead: My latest complete project was two food service designs and installations in New York City. FoodParc at ground level off Sixth Avenue and Bar Basque, the second level lounge and restaurant. My designs started, literally, on 8.5” x 11” sketch paper on the way back from New York after the first meeting with the architects, Philip Koether, Architects. The designs were faithfully reproduced by Koether’s expert team. Concept moves to completion through a complex symphony of cooperative expertise.

In the movie field, I’ve just completed pre-production contract designs for a young, recognized director for a movie title that is in progress. It is not my position to tell what it is.

Dotted Line: What have been the most enjoyable aspects of these projects?
Mead: They’ve all been enjoyable because you learn from each cooperative venture. The surprises come as the project moves from concept to idea to design. Adaptation to end format protocols, unwelcome shifts in focus by either capital sources for the project or intrusion into the process by those unfamiliar with the project intent yet given authority to “change.”

Dotted Line: Tell us about your current work in your new book, Sentury II. Has your focus changed over the years?
Mead: As a follow-up to Sentury, Sentury II covers the last 10 years of professional enterprise. My focus? It’s not changed for more than 50 years. The tools that accomplish the various desired results change; the methodology does not. The mistake I see in current rush to the computer is that the tool becomes more important than either the idea or the technique. This is disastrous.

Dotted Line: What interests you these days?
Mead: I have been interested in the development of a tool. We now have semi-intuitive “helper” software that anticipates habitual use of various software features. The hazard is that you come to depend on those “conveniences” to the detriment of genuine creative use of the exotic software being used. And, with many software applications, you aren’t given specific “turn off” directions. Another fascinating drift is the increasing insistence that since work is being done on a computer, the professional fee structure should be downgraded to a time/result formula rather than a realization that the computer implementation is a tool function, not a creative front-end function. Financial vectors in most professional account sources simply don’t recognize the difference between the two.

1982 poster for Tron

Dotted Line: With the buzz surrounding Tron: Legacy, our thoughts naturally return to the 1982 Tron that you worked on. Can you share with us what that job was like?
Mead: For the original Tron I designed the tank, the aircraft carrier (Sark’s command ship), the interior control set for the recognizer, the light cycles, of course, the release graphics of the movie title, the rotating CPU, the CPU approach field, the game arenas, the holding cells for the players, Sark’s command camp pit, Sark’s command pedestal and backup and several set drawings used to create the story environment including Yori’s apartment and the scenery design for the tank chase.

I was invited for lunch on the Disney lot by producers Steven Lisberger and Don Kushner and received a book of stuff that Steven already had with him. I started after about two or three weeks after contract matters had been agreed to by Disney.

I worked on Tron from my home studio, as I have with all the movies I’ve worked on. I always have several projects going through the corporation and being sequestered in an “on lot” cubicle doesn’t work. My function is meta-staff working one-to-one with the director and his immediate authority, the production designer.

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A Legacy Revisited: Art Center Alumnus Eric Barba Envisions the World of Tron

For Art Center alumnus Eric Barba, things didn’t seem like they could get any better after he won an Oscar for his groundbreaking special effects work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That is, until he got the gig overseeing the special effects for Tron: Legacy, opening this weekend.

Courtesy of Disney

For Benjamin Button, Barba was tasked with making Brad Pitt appear older. For Tron: Legacy, his challenge was the opposite: to make a present-day Jeff Bridges appear as he did in the 1982 original. And, it had to appear authentic. Add to that the intense pressure of a cult-status 1982 film Tron (visualized by another Art Center alum, Syd Mead, who we also spoke to this week), and Barba had his work cut out for him.

Barba has been with the SoCal-based Digital Domain visual production studio for 13 years, and like many of the top directors he collaborates with, he’s equally comfortable working in film or advertising. He started at Digital Domain as a digital artist on The Fifth Element and CG supervisor on Supernova before rising to visual effects supervisor for David Fincher’s Zodiac.

As we count down to the opening of Tron: Legacy, the Dotted Line caught up with Barba to talk about his work as visual effects supervisor on this much-anticipated movie, his work and, of course, Art Center.

Dotted Line: How was working on the new Tron film different from others you’ve worked on?
Eric Barba: This was the most difficult project I’ve ever done, for many reasons. It was by far the most challenging. The work we had done on Benjamin Button was considered the holy grail of special effects because we were aging a human face, which hadn’t been done before. The [Jeff Bridges] character Clu pushes that envelope so far, and so much faster, than we expected. We didn’t know that these sorts of effects [such as portraying a decades-younger Bridges] were even possible to do. And working in 3D was new for me, too.

Dotted Line: What are the different considerations when working in 3D?
Barba: It’s incredibly challenging technically, because we’re still in the early stages of learning how to shoot 3D from a how-the-camera-works standpoint. I like to joke that the camera we used to film this will be in a museum at some point as a relic, because if you look at it, it’s actually two cameras strapped together.

And because of this there are a lot of technical challenges and mechanical imperfections, lens imperfections and the like. You have to continuously fix things and put stuff back together. For example, when we’re trying to shoot two actors playing a disc game, if they don’t stand in the correct space on a 50-foot screen, then the shot is ruined. All the techniques we use for tracking—making sure our CG and our studio camera line up—have to be rewritten because they have to be much, much more accurate for 3D. And you have to render everything twice, so it’s twice the disk space. Then you have to have development systems to look at it and judge it. It definitely raises the bar as far as technical difficulty.

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