Author Archives: Mike Winder

Designer Jeremy Mende on ‘anxious futurism,’ petroleum, biorhythmic data

Jeremy Mende's "100 Years from Now" installation in Rome.

Students packed an overflowing Los Angeles Times auditorium last Thursday night for 3×3*: Type Guys, an event that featured three presentations and a lively Q&A with designers Jeremy Mende, Kyle Cooper and Art Center’s own Simon Johnston—three men that have crafted the way we see, understand and interact with typography.

Last week we gave you highlights from Kyle Cooper’s presentation. Today we focus on San Francisco-based Jeremy Mende, an associate professor of design at the California College of the Arts, where he teaches experiemental typography and critical theory.

In 2000, he founded MendeDesign, a firm that describes itself as creating “unique, poetic and unexpected messages” and that believes that beauty and authenticity have a “critical role in producing things of value and durability.”

Mende has been recognized internationally for his work and has pieces in several collections including at SFMOMA. In 2010-11, he was the Rome Prize Fellow in Design at the American Academy in Rome.

At Art Center, he spoke with students about work he’s created that meet at the “interesection of [his] interest in psychology and [his] interest in design and [his] interest in typography.”

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Title sequence designer Kyle Cooper on fear, bleeding type, and going lo-fi for “Argo”

(L to R) Simon Johnston, Jeremy Mende and Kyle Cooper field questions from students.

Students packed an overflowing Los Angeles Times auditorium last night for 3×3*: Type Guys, an event that featured three presentations and a lively Q&A with designers Jeremy Mende, Kyle Cooper and Art Center’s own Simon Johnston—three men that have crafted the way we see, understand and interact with typography.

You can read highlights from Johnston’s and Mende’s presentations; today, we’ll focus on Cooper.

The founder of Prologue Films, Cooper has been credited by Details magazine as “almost single-handedly revitalizing the main title sequence as an art form.”

The designer behind the title sequences for films like Se7en, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and the critically acclaimed current release Argo shared with the crowd his process, his philosophy and some behind-the-scenes tidbits.

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Asking ‘Imagine If?’: Interaction Design at Art Center

Alumnus Ian Sands PROD 95 in Microsoft's prototyping lab, testing a TouchWall.

This Fall term, Art Center took another step in its evolution and launched an Interaction Design (IxD) degree program headed up by user experience pioneer Maggie Hendrie.

Now, wait a minute, you might be thinking, hasn’t the College been teaching interaction design for years? After all, Art Center has alumni working at Google, Microsoft, Samsung and virtually every company exploring the boundaries of interactivity.

The answer to that, of course, is yes, Art Center has indeed been preparing its graduates to enter the field of interaction design for the better part of two decades.

“Art Center has a long history of maintaining the dynamic between the development of a craft and the application of it, and interaction design is an applied craft,” Hendrie recently told The Dotted Line. “Also, Art Center is already outstanding in the very fields in which interaction is applied: environments, interfaces, products, automotives, social projects and systems.”

Take for example alumnus Ian Sands, the co-founder of vision and strategy firm Intentional Futures, who graduated from the College in 1995 with a degree in Product Design.

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Piaggio asks students to envision mobility in 2022

A Vespa LXV-150, one of the many vehicles Piaggio brought on campus for students to study. Photo: Chuck Spangler

Did you happen to notice a swarm of motorcycles earlier this term at Hillside Campus?

The reason for the two-wheeled gathering was Piaggio–the fourth largest producer of scooters, motorcylces and compact commercial vehicles in the world–is sponsoring a Transportation Design project this term titled Envisioning Personal Mobility in 2022. As part of the course they brought a variety of their current vehicles for students to study up close.

In the course, the Italian vehicle maker–whose brands include Piaggio, Vespa, Aprilia and Moto Guzzi–has challenged Art Center students to envision how young people, between the ages of 18 and 25, will move around 10 years from now.

Questions Piaggio has posed to the students include: In 2022 will people have the same buying power they have now? Will they be able to afford personal mobility? Will they have jobs that change more frequently?

Piaggio, which plans on opening a design center in Pasadena, hopes that the students creations both inspire its employees and provides them with insight into opportunities of important areas of growth where the company should be engaged a decade from now.

And with Car Classic ’12 right around the corner, we’re reminded of an interview we did with Art Center alumnus Miguel Galluzi TRANS ’86, Vice President of Design at the Piaggio Group, for Car Classic ’09: By Air, Land & Sea.

The full profile is included after the break.

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Graphic Design Students Ready for Their Closeups

Still from student Sang Chung's video profile of student Bo Yeoung Han.

Graphic Design students in last summer’s Advanced Graphics Studio course were given an unusual assignment. Each of the students, none of whom had prior experience shooting live action video, were asked by instructor Petrula Vrontikis to collaborate with one of their classmates to create two- to four-minute promotional videos of one another.

The students were given approximately six weeks to research, storyboard, interview and to learn the basics of contemporary digital shooting and editing. Motion Graphics instructor Rob Garrot provided the students with support and insight from a video editors perspective, and a number of professionals came to class to provide critical feedback, including product designer Spencer Nikosey PROD ’08 of KILLSPENCER, whose video profile for Behind the Hustle was a partial inspiration for the course.

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Bringing It All Back Home: Designmatters Students Create Furniture for India’s Low-Income Housing Residents

"Living Home: India" Designmatters students, faculty and staff in Bangalore, India last summer.

"Living Home: India" Designmatters students, faculty and staff in Bangalore, India last summer.

Last term, students in Living Home: India—a transdisciplinary Designmatters studio led by the Environmental Design department—spent their summer investigating the living needs of low-income housing dwellers in India, and then building furniture prototypes for use in the type of high quality, low-cost housing championed by Ashoka, a social entrepreneurship nonprofit and partner for the studio.

Due to the reduced scale and high occupancy rate of the housing units, the students were tasked with creating reduced scale and transformable prototypes. They also needed to make sure the furniture they designed was environmentally responsible and could be developed in collaboration with community stakeholders and local craftspeople in India.

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New Tsunami Awareness Designmatters Studio “The Next Wave” Kickoff on Tuesday, September 11

Attention Art Center students:

Don’t miss the launch of Designmatters’ new studio The Next Wave, in which students, in partnership with the US Geological Survey (USGS), will create a campaign to raise awareness among Southern Californians of the profound hazards and affects of a plausible West Coast tsunami.

Join faculty Guillaume Wolf and La Mer Walker next Tuesday, September 11 at 1:45 p.m. in the Faculty Dining Room for a one hour presentation on social transformation, social media and the future of design.

The presentation will be followed by a Q&A with USGS scientists on the topic of tsunami scenarios.

For more information, click here.

Related:

MDP Showcased in Little Tokyo Design Week
Art Center Earthquake Project Showcased at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Get Ready to Shake, Rattle and Roll

Meet Environmental Design alumna Zorine Pooladian

Designer Zorine Pooladian ENVL '12.

Sometimes finding your true calling can feel like flipping on a light switch. Just ask designer Zorine Pooladian ENVL ’12.

The Environmental Design alum was first turned on to the world of lighting design in an Art Center at Night (ACN) course; these days she’s working on a lighting project she plans to unveil at New York Design Week next year.

We sat down recently with Pooladian to ask her about her ACN experience, and here’s what she told us:

“I have always loved art and architecture. I grew up in a 300-year-old house in Iran that had high ceilings and walls covered in paintings. As a child, I remember being amazed that somebody could leave something behind that would last for centuries.” Continue reading →

Art Center at Night: Register now for Fall courses

Untitled by Lori Dedeyan. Created in "Photography as Contemporary Art" with instructor Bia Gayatto.

Plato once said, “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

Sometimes breaking free of old patterns can be a scary prospect. Know what’s even scarier? Getting stuck in a rut out of a fear of trying something new.

At Art Center at Night, we offer more than 150 courses—taught by award-winning instructors who are practicing artists and designers in their field—that can help you step out of your comfort zone, learn a new technique and expand your creative horizons.

New courses offered this Fall include: Personal Branding; Children’s Picture Books; Meditation and the Creative Mind 2; Traditional Letterpress: Analog; Introduction to zBrush; Introduction to Motorcycle Design; and Creating Content for Automotive Media.

Courses start September 10; register today!

Ready to step into the light?

Related:

Meet Art Center at Night student Arotin Hartounian

Just call him Stan: Art Center at Night’s Stan Kong

Tony Luna: Making Change Happen

Valedictorian Roy Tatum Shares with Graduation Crowd Lessons He Learned at Art Center

Valedictorian Roy Tatum addresses the Summer 2012 graduation crowd.

At last Saturday’s Summer 2012 graduation, Graphic Design graduate and Art Center valedictorian Roy Tatum shared with the assembled crowd some lessons about life, learning and the design process that he picked up while at the College.

Here are a few highlights.

On his high school aspirations:

While everyone I went to high school was making plans for college, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to attend [college]. I hadn’t found something I was passionate enough about to devote a significant amount of time.

On something a fellow musician told him:

I had just finished playing a show and I was talking to the drummer of the band that had played after us. He had gone to an art and design school in Los Angeles and he told me about his experience and I thought, That doesn’t even sound like school. That just sounds awesome.

On Art Center’s Public Programs:

Like many of you, I started by attending Art Center at Night. I remember being so excited and eager to learn from the teacher during the first night of class. I came home and thought to myself, This is what I love, this is what I’m passionate about. I was so excited I couldn’t wait to apply to the day program.

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