Author Archives: Lynne Heffley

Food photography power couple: Alumni Q&A with Peden + Munk

Unknown-1UnknownTaylor Peden and Jen Munkvold met as Photography and Imaging students at Art Center, fell in love and in 2006 teamed up creatively as Peden + Munk. This inspired partnership now counts among its credits photo essay-style editorial and commercial work — including covers — for Bon Appétit, Sunset Magazine, Glamour, GQ, Food and Wine, The New York Times Magazine, Langham Hotels, William Sonoma and Crate & Barrel and other major companies and magazines, chefs, restaurants and hotels.

Just in time for summer, the pair’s trademark color-saturated, sumptuous food photography can also be seen in The Grilling Book: The Definitive Guide from Bon Appétit; Sweet, by Los Angeles-based baker Valerie Gordon; and A New Napa Cuisine, Peden + Munk’s most recent collaboration with three-star Michelin chef Christopher Kostow, is forthcoming in October from Ten Speed Press. They also recently launched their motion work with this piece for Bon Appétit, profiling Martha’s Vineyard restaurateur, Chris Fisher.

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Life after ICFF: Q&A with Environmental Design alum Chris Adamick

 

Chris Adamick

Chris Adamick

Chris Adamick (BA 07 Environmental Design) is the manager of Global Marketing, Store Design at Gap’s New York headquarters. He is an award-winning designer whose multidisciplinary, large- and small-scale work includes commercial, civic, educational and residential design. Adamick maintains his own studio, Chris Adamick Design, for independent projects, and has collaborated with Bernhardt Design, among others. Bernhardt honored Adamick in 2011 by featuring his Audio chair in a retrospective at ICFF of its ongoing interdisciplinary studio with Art Center College of Design, which educates students in the process of designing products for production in the commercial market. Today Adamick’s client list includes Bed Bath and Beyond, W Hotels, Disney and Haworth and he has held prominent positions at Pentagram, Rios Clementi Hale Studios, ByLissoni, Studio Gaia and other high-profile companies.

The Dotted Line: What drew you to Art Center?

Chris Adamick: Jorge Pardo [the noted sculptor and an Art Center graduate], one of my professors at UCLA, opened my mind to art existing in the world beyond fine art—in architecture, in product design. He suggested Art Center. I looked at the Fine Art program first and it was stellar, just stellar, but when I saw the design work going on there [at the College], I instantly knew that was what I wanted to do.

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ICFF 2014 spotlights alum Hines Fischer’s people-centric furniture design

Hines Fisher drafts his people-centric designs

Hines Fischer drafts his “people-centric” designs

One of the first students to enroll in the Furniture and Fixtures track of Art Center’s Graduate Environmental Design program when it launched, Hines Fischer specializes in “people-centric” furniture design for office spaces. He is among a select group of students to represent the College at both the 2013 and 2014 International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) during New York Design Week.

Last year, he says, “it was really nice to get the chance to go to a show like this before I had jobs on the line, so that I could kind of take in the landscape. I took a lot of notes and met a lot of famous designers, which was an incredible experience.” Fischer also reconnected there with people he had met while interning at a furniture company prior to coming to Art Center. “I reminded them that I would be graduating soon.”

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Grad Trans rolls its first grad off the line, fully equipped to change the future of mobility systems

David Day Lee

David Day Lee

Several semesters into Art Center’s Undergraduate Transportation Design program, and after an internship at one of the major automotive design studios in the Los Angeles area, David Day Lee realized that a career as a studio designer wasn’t his calling. He wanted to impact the automotive industry in a more comprehensive way. Lee talked to his professors and other faculty at Art Center about his wider interests—transportation mobility systems, integrated connectivity technology and cross-disciplinary strategic design solutions—and was invited to become the first student in Art Center’s vanguard Graduate Transportation Design program.

The approach would be a systematic one, “where you’re not just designing the vehicle,” Lee says, “but imagining vehicle design in the context of an ecosystem.”

Last week, he became the program’s first graduate. The Dotted Line caught up with him during his final term.

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