Author Archives: Jered Gold

Advertising Department Launches New Speaker Series

Art Center Advertising students—as well as the entire Art Center community—can enjoy candid discussions from a variety of seasoned advertising and other professionals at a new speakers series kicking off tonight.

Creative directors, copywriters, art directors, strategic planners, emerging technology experts, agents of social change, publishers, game developers, directors and many more will participate in this exciting new series, which will tackle issues from the creative side to the business side of advertising—and all points in-between.

The series kicks off tonight with art director Rob Anton from acclaimed ad agency 72andSunny. Following the discussion, there will be a Q&A with the speaker, and students can show current portfolio work for critique and feedback. Enjoy Anton’s spot for the Getty above.

Advertising Speakers Series: Rob Anton
Thursday, July 21, 7 p.m.
Hillside Campus
Conference Room B

Designing for Sustainability: The Student Perspective

Photo by Dice Yamaguchi

The scope of design is rapidly expanding in leaps and bounds. Today’s designers feel a responsibility to address environmental, social and economic needs with their work more than ever before. In light of the changes taking place in recent years, Art Center has been developing a comprehensive design curriculum and its importance has been underscored in the school’s five-year strategic plan.

Art Center students Jessie Kawata and Yan Kramsky are co-presidents of the student-run group EcoCouncil, which has been largely responsible for helping green the College and introduce sustainable initiatives throughout the campus and curriculum.

The two were featured keynote speakers at last week’s California Higher Education Sustainability Conference. Together, they led the final presentation of the conference, sharing their perspectives on sustainable design and reflections on the event. Earlier in the conference, Vice President of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo participated in a panel discussion moderated by Associate Professor and Director of Sustainability Initiatives Heidrun Mumper-Drumm titled Embedding Sustainability into Existing Curriculum.

Kawata and Kramsky took some time out of their busy schedules—they graduate next month!—to talk with Dotted Line about EcoCouncil, comprehensive design and what they hope people took away from their presentation.

Dotted Line: Just what is the California Higher Education Sustainability Conference?

Photo by Dice Yamaguchi

Jessie Kawata: Students, educators, staff and administrators from community colleges, four-year colleges, public and private schools come together to talk about sustainability and various Climate Action Plan (CAP) initiatives in higher education. It was held in Long Beach.

We were one of the few private colleges to attend, and we were the only featured speakers from a private school—not to mention Art Center was the only art and design college present. So it was a real honor for both of us to be involved.

Dotted Line: How did the opportunity for you two to be keynote speakers come about?

Yan Kramsky: Heidrun Mumper-Drumm suggested that we apply. It’s funny, we didn’t realize we were applying to be keynote speakers, just workshop speakers, so we were surprised and honored to be selected as keynotes.

We have experience with sustainability initiatives from a grassroots perspective through our work with EcoCouncil, and I think we are the types of students that they were looking for, who could share our specific experiences.

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The Changing Face of the Art Center Catalog

Guest post by Art Center Archivist Robert Dirig

Art Center’s most recent Viewbook has received rave reviews, winning an Art Directors Club Silver Award and now a Gold Award in the 2011 CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) Circle of Excellence Award. Congrats to the Design Office and Marketing and Communications team for these well-deserved honors!

Here in the College Archives, we recently began a project scanning all Art Center catalogs and viewbooks, starting back to the first one published in 1937.

Enjoy this slideshow of images, and let us know if you have any that aren’t included here. We seem to have a gap between 1965-67 and 1972-74. Stay tuned for an announcement for when they are available online!

To visit the Archives, or to donate materials, contact Art Center Archivist Robert Dirig at 626.396.2208 or robert.dirig@artcenter.edu.

Students Win Big at the ADDYs


Advertising students Adam Chang, Melissa Ploysophon, Becky Ginos and Jack Collier, in collaboration with Photography and Imaging student Jeremy Jackson, recently won a gold and two silver ADDYs for their work at the local ADDY Awards, the first of a three-tier, national competition.

Chang and Ploysophon went on to beat out over 1,000 other entries from across the country to win a National Gold ADDY for their Atomic Fireballs campaign. Film student Ian Kammer won a gold for Boxer.

Congrats on these well-deserved honors!

Surviving Carmageddon


You’ve been warned and now it’s almost here—Carmageddon, or the weekend the 405 closure gridlocked the entire Los Angeles metro area.

While the 405 is nowhere near Art Center—it’s 30 miles west!—we’ll likely be feeling the pinch here as well. The L.A. Times predicts that Carmageddon will affect Pasadena and Downtown, too.

Here’s a mini-survival guide for the Art Center community:

Of course, the entire ordeal might be over-hyped. Leave your weekend suggestions in the comments!

More on what is shaping up to be a traffic event of epic proportions:

The Colombia Experience: Design is a Two-Way Street

The following post is from the Designmatters blog.


Guest Blogger Mariana Prieto di Colloredo (Product Design, 6th term) is the lead contact of Art Center’s social impact student organization Mustard, a member of the sustainability-focused student organization EcoCouncil and a candidate for the Designmatters Concentration in Art and Design for Social Impact.

Sustainability is more often than not linked to the responsible use of our planets resources to assure its availability for future generations. As true as this is, sustainability can also be applied to our own lives. As designers, we can “burn out” when we drain our creative resources but we can prevent this by refreshing and recharging ourselves from time to time.

While we are in school the opportunity to go out and research different cultures in a new, exciting and relaxed setting is limited, to say the least.

Because of this, EcoCouncil has taken the initiative to plan a research trip to explore a new country in a different and exciting way. This last spring Eco Council traveled for ten days to Colombia to remove ourselves from our comfortable surroundings and to work on a design project at an organic mango plantation in Anapoima, Colombia (a small town located 2 hours outside of Bogota).

Our goal was to come up with one design project during our time there while doing physical work at the farm and learning the inner workings of an organic plantation in Latin America.

After days of wielding a pickax, teak planting, mud fishing, milking, horseback riding and learning all there is to know about mango trees, we agreed the most valuable experience was working together with the farm workers through every step of the design process.

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MDP Showcased in Little Tokyo Design Week

Art Center’s Graduate Media Design (MDP) program will be among the international designers, architects, filmmakers, corporations and other educational institutions exploring the “New Urban Lifestyle” as part of Little Tokyo Design Week: Future City (LTDW) this week. LTDW celebrates the power and energy of cutting-edge design and technology emerging from Japan and its relation to current trends materializing in Los Angeles.

“We look forward to participating alongside world class designers, artists and creative thinkers and engaging the public in an exciting dialogue about the future of our cities and the future of design,” says MDP Chair Ann Burdick.

Taking place July 14 through 17, the free, four-day public festival will span the geographic breadth of downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district with a series of museum exhibitions, student installations, public happenings and temporary galleries in the form of shipping containers placed throughout the public plazas of Little Tokyo. Under the auspices of the MDP program, the College will produce three separate projects for LTDW exploring how design and technology will shape lives in the cities of the future.

“Grad Media Design emphasizes an approach that responds to issues without the assumption of a particular type or mode of outcome and, similarly, to resist the adaptation of common assumptions for topics of technological or social concern,” says Tim Durfee, core faculty and director of amp: Projects in Media and Architecture within the MDP program. “This ethic is in evidence for both our PLAN C installation and Metropolis of Me symposium, in which we approach familiar topics from somewhat novel directions in order to reveal overlooked opportunities or implications.”

There are three projects being produced by Grad Media Design for LTDW.

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3×3: Trends in Packaging and Interaction

Tomorrow, join the Graphic Design Department as they present 3×3: Trends in Packaging and Interaction.

Hear from three industry leaders as they discuss how packaging and interaction design are merging, and the entire field of graphic design is shifting. They’ll share their predictions for what to look forward to as design goes beyond the surface.

The speakers are:

  • Chris Hacker, Chief Design Officer, Johnson & Johnson
  • Maggie Hendrie, Strategy Director, UX Designer, Educator
  • James Chu, Product Designer, Branding Strategist, Educator

Don’t miss this great event!

3×3: Trends in Packaging and Interaction
Wednesday, July 13, 7:30 p.m.
Los Angeles Times Media Center
Hillside Campus

Best Practices and the Business of Art

Don’t miss this lecture presented by the Office of Career Development and Fine Art Department on best practices and the business of fine art. Speaker Karen Atkinson will discuss exhibition strategies, ethics, finding a job, preparing portfolios, pricing and selling work and finances for artists.

Atkinson is a media, installation and public artist, an independent curator and collaborator. She has published and guest edited a number of publications.

Creator of the GYST software for artists, in 2000 she founded GYST as an artist-run professional practices service company. Currently, she focuses on making life better for artists and less on exhibiting her own work.

Artists’ Best Practices and the Business of Art
Thursday, July 14, 7 p.m.
Art Center College of Design
Hillside Campus
L.A. Times Media Center