Category Archives: Alumni Relations

Tiffany Trenda at Salon Hysterique: If you attend one feminist new media art opening this year, this would be a good bet

Tiffany Trenda performing Urban Devotion, October 30, 2010. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph © Tiffany Trenda 2011

Tiffany Trenda performing Urban Devotion, October 30, 2010. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph © Tiffany Trenda 2011

New media performance artist and Art Center alum, Tiffany Trenda (Fine Art, ’02) will unveil her video installation, Le Grande Odalisque, at SALON HYSTERIQUE in London next Tuesday, from 6 to 10 p.m. For those of us stranded on this side of the pond, here’s an advance glimpse at the spirit animating Trenda’s work, the soiree and the larger show of like-minded creative provocateurs, which runs through April 19, 2014.

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Donor scholarship enables South African student to realize her artistic dreams

Therese Swanepoel's final envisions a electrifying vision of Coachella

Therese Swanepoel’s final envisioned a electrifying vision of Coachella

Therese Swanepoel understands better than most people how a scholarship can change a life. The second-term Environmental Design major was on the brink of dropping out of Art Center due to unexpected financial hardship when she learned that she had been selected as the first recipient of the Joseph and Rebecca Lacko Annual Scholarship.

She was visiting her parents in her home country of South Africa when she got the news via email.  “I simply started crying,” Swanepoel recalls. “My family assumed something bad had happened and soon found out that my tears were tears of joy.”

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Art Center alumni notes: January 2014

Yves Behar, shot for Vanity Fair by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson

Yves Behar, shot for Vanity Fair by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson

It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever spent time at Art Center that this is not a college that attracts loafers and procrastinators. That creative drive doesn’t slow down after graduation, as evidenced in the following compendium of alumni accomplishments.

News

Yves Béhar PROD 91 was featured in a Vanity Fair story about his work at the nexus of technology, design and Silicon Valley. Vanity Fair

Victor Cass ILLU 89 has been elected president of the San Gabriel Chapter of the National Institute for Mental Illness.  NAMI Press Release

URB-E, designed by Art Center faculty member and alum Grant Delgatty ENVL 95, was voted best of CES 2014 by TechCrunch.  Best of CES 2014

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Building a better Super Bowl spot, Art Center-style

When I think about what it takes to create a great Super Bowl spot, I can’t help but first think of all of the things we had to tell our teams NOT to do to create one.

  • No animals doing things animals can’t do.
  • No old people doing things old people can’t do.
  • No inanimate objects doing things inanimate objects can’t do.
  • No Martians or other forms of aliens.
  • No cavemen.
  • No deserted islands.
  • Nothing that uses the soundtrack from “2001 Space Odyssey.”
  • Nothing that features a chimpanzee, even if it is doing things chimpanzees can do.
  • No one going to heaven.
  • Nothing that requires you to play me a special effects reel from a company in Finland before telling me the idea.
  • No 70′s hits and site gags.
  • No patriotic attempts to make people cry.
  • And please, no old chestnuts I killed last year.

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Monsters Inc: Art Center Alum Stefan Bucher’s yeti inspires Saks holiday window display


Each December, Saks Fifth Avenue signals the beginning of the season of warmth, joy and supersized spending with the unveiling of its holiday window display. The now iconic dioramas depicting a new take on a winter wonderland each year have become a prime destination for New York’s annual influx of year-end tourists, seeking a high dose of holiday spirit.

This past year, Saks’ holiday display was entirely based on Art Center alum, Stefan Bucher‘s children’s book, The Yeti Story. The luxury department story commissioned him to create a holiday book, centered around a Yeti reputed to live on the roof of the flagship store on Fifth Avenue. Here Bucher (Advertising ’96) takes us behind the scenes to reveal the origin story of his encounter with the furry mythic beasts with an infinitely high cold tolerance.

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Innovate Pasadena: Ayzenberg Group traces its roots to Art Center

Ayzenberg Group lobby

Ayzenberg Group lobby

As Ayzenberg Group celebrates its 20th anniversary, founder and Art Center alum, Eric Ayzenberg, reflects on the dynamics that originally inspired him to plant his professional roots in Pasadena’s Innovation Corridor.

In the early 1990s, we brought a decade of advertising and design experience acquired from both the East and West Coasts to an up-and-coming area of great potential in Pasadena. With a small crew of like-minded souls I had met at Art Center College of Design and beyond, we purchased a spacious 15,000-square-foot studio on Walnut Street, plus an adjacent 5,000-square-foot space next door, and established our agency.

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Rock ‘n’ roll soldier conquers Art Center…and Hollywood

Sam Gonzalez

Samuel Gonzalez Jr. Photo by Lindzee Meltzer.

“There is no true terror in the bang, only the anticipation of it.” — Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s wisdom provided the inspiration for the concept of “CATASTROPHE,” a month-long exhibition of elaborately staged, large-scale, dark-toned photos created by undergraduate Film alum Samuel Gonzalez Jr. opening today (Jan. 28) at the ArcLight Theaters in Hollywood.

The 30 photographs on display in the theater lobby through March 28 juxtapose surrealist images illustrating the turmoil of the human condition against period landscapes, all the while alluding to humanity’s relationship to the artificiality of a heightened cinematic experience. The psychological narrative animating the photos informs the show’s subtextual ideas about the collision between film and reality. Gonzalez’ eerie pieces blend beauty with horror, love with betrayal and truth with despair, suggesting an open world of endless interpretations and possibilities.

Gonzalez has gained an intimate understanding of this particular confluence of ideas, after spending much of his life creatively interpreting the world around him to create new opportunities for himself. As a young Army recruit stationed in Iraq, Gonzalez’ deployed a creative outlet to offset the stress of combat by starting a rock band called Madison Avenue (after the ironically named path on which his barracks were built). That experience paved the way (financially) for him to attend Art Center’s film department and has since provided the inspiration for the mini-series he’s currently developing with one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers.

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Why is it so hard to finish a passion project?

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“Our time at Art Center is all about pushing limits and taking chances, but a lot of us lose that creative fire when our personal visions butt up against professional realities. In many ways our book RE:INVENT was a reclamation of the risk-taking spirit we had when we were back in school. Art Center alum,” says Derick Tsai (Transportation and Entertainment Design, ’05), who found his own unique creative voice (and heaps of critical and professional success) by thrusting himself out of the security of his thriving design studio and into the wilds of his own imagination. Here he tells the story of how he forged his path to personal and professional fulfillment.

Between the time demands of paying the bills and spending time with our friends and family, it seems like our passion projects never get off the ground. And this is a shame because it’s those passion projects that are often the truest expression of our personal vision and have the potential to elevate us to the next level. It’s pretty easy to get started but at a certain point, questions and doubts inevitably creep into our minds.

”What’s going to become of this?”

“Will anyone care?”

“Will this be worth anything?”

That last one’s the killer.

That thought has stopped me in my tracks more times than I’d like to admit. And I’m guessing it has stopped many of you as well. So I want to share with you how a personal project of mine eventually developed into a critically and financially successful book, lucrative client work and a TEDx Talk for Livestream audience of over 30,000 people.

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Alumni Q&A with Microsoft design pioneer, Bill Flora

Bill Flora photo by Alex Aristei.

Bill Flora on his recent visit to Art Center. Photo by Alex Aristei.

When Bill Flora arrived to his first day of work at Microsoft just over 20 years ago, as the ink was still drying on his Art Center degree, there were only seven designers working on staff at the company. At the time, Bill Gates’ thriving empire was the Goliath of the software industry. Products like Microsoft Word had become a brand synonymous with the service it provided, like Kleenex or Q-Tips. In essence, Microsoft sold itself — so design took a backseat to innovations in engineering.

Things have changed considerably since then. It’s no coincidence that design has become a prime mover at Microsoft, driving the development of its most high-profile software and hardware releases.  This shift occurred thanks in no small part to the contributions Flora made during his two-decade tenure at the company, which included work on a wide variety of products, from the Encarta Encyclopedia to the Windows Phone. His most lasting legacy at Microsoft, however, may lie within the set of design principles (now known as Microsoft Design Language), which he devised prior to leaving his post as design director in 2011 to launch his own interactive design firm, Tectonic.

During a recent trip to reconnect with his Art Center roots, Flora (BFA, 1991) took time out to chat with the Dotted Line about his career trajectory as a high-flying design evangelist in the tech world.

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