Category Archives: Development

Doyald Young Memorial Scholarship Established

Young

Award-winning graphic and logotype designer, alumnus, mentor and revered faculty member Doyald Young, who passed away in February, will be honored by his alma mater with the Doyald Young Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship, which will be available to incoming and current Graphic Design students, was announced at Young Love, a celebration of Young’s life and legacy taking place at the College last weekend. With enough support, the College intends to endow the scholarship to benefit its students in perpetuity.

“Shortly before his passing, Doyald said, ‘If you have the gift of teaching, you must pass it on,’” Art Center President Lorne Buchman says. “In establishing the Doyald Young Memorial Scholarship, it is our hope that we honor the generosity and strength of a gifted artist and powerful teacher—and encourage others in that same spirit of giving to ensure his legacy in the next generation.”

Young taught lettering and logotype design in Art Center’s Graphic Design Department for decades. His freelance work included logotypes for hotels, clubs, universities, financial institutions, arts, entertainment and practically every other industry. He created several corporate and commercial fonts and published three books about his work: Logotypes & Letterforms, Fonts & Logos and Dangerous Curves.

Young was named Inaugural Master of the School by Art Center in 2001, named a Fellow of the Los Angeles chapter of AIGA in 2006, received an AIGA Medal in 2009 and received an honorary doctorate degree of humane letters from Art Center in 2010. His life story and immeasurable talent was also documented by lynda.com as part of their 2010 “Creative Inspirations” series. Young received his formal education at Frank Wiggins Trade School and Art Center.

Individuals interested in making donations to the scholarship can donate online, or contact Senior Development Officer Palencia Turner at 626.396.2366 or palencia.turner@artcenter.edu.

Sketch Garden to Honor Norm Schureman

To celebrate the life and honor the legacy of late Product Design alumnus and faculty member Norm Schureman, the College will create the Norm Schureman Sketch Garden at Hillside Campus. This will be a space for sketching, contemplation, gardening and enjoying nature.

© Steven A. Heller/Art Center College of Design

Schureman inspired countless students through his passionate teaching and love of drawing. He often invited students into his own home garden to continue the class critiques.

We’re inviting current students and recent graduates to join us on Saturday, March 26, to help us design the new sketch garden. Teams of two or three will compete to design the garden. All majors are welcome, and multi-disciplinary teams are encouraged. Bring sketching, drawing and model-making hand tools—but no computers are allowed!

Every team will be given a presentation board on which to mount their entire presentation. Winning entrants will be selected to become part of the design team that will see project through design development, construction and fabrication phase.

A detailed agenda and rules will be provided at the beginning of the charrette. The event starts promptly at 8:30 a.m.—no late entries permitted—and RSVPs are required as this is a closed event. RSVP to meraz@artcenter.edu.

We’re also happy to report that the Norman Schureman Memorial Scholarship has raised more than $80,000 to date. Help us reach our goal of $100,000! Individuals interested in making donations to the scholarship can donate online or contact Senior Development Officer Palencia Turner at 626.396.2366.

Design Charrette: Norm Schureman Sketch Garden
March 26, 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m.
Hillside Campus, Room 202
RSVP: meraz@artcenter.edu

Running to Celebrate Life

We checked in with Product Design alumna and faculty member Wendee Lee to see how the Rose Bowl 5K went earlier this month.

Lee ran the race to celebrate and honor the memory of fellow alumnus and faculty member Norm Schureman.

“The race was fantastic,” Lee says. “It was sunny and warm—perfect running weather. I had planned out my race tempo and while it was my slowest 5K, it was definitely the strongest and most enjoyable one I’ve run. I finished right at my target finish time, feeling no pain.”

Lee asked supporters to donate to Schureman’s Memorial Scholarship fund as a way to both celebrate his life, and help ensure that his legacy continues. It’s not too late to donate to the scholarship.

“The Norm Schureman Memorial scholarship is particularly important to me as a Product Design alum and faculty member,” Lee explains. “I had Norm as an instructor, and was lucky enough to have him as a colleague as well. It means so much to know this scholarship will help future Product Design students.”

Donate to the Norm Schureman Memorial Scholarship online today.

Or, mail your donation.

Grants to Benefit Scholarship, Williamson Gallery

© Steven A. Heller/Art Center College of Design

Long-time Art Center supporters the Pasadena Art Alliance (PAA) has announced that they are graciously awarding the College grants totaling $30,000. These grants will benefit the Pasadena Art Alliance scholarship, which supports undergraduate Fine Art students, as well as Williamson Gallery exhibitions in 2011.

Since 1955, the PAA has raised millions of dollars to support contemporary visual art in Southern California. All monies raised through the PAA’s fundraising, including its biennial art auction, go directly to the grants program. With each grant, the PAA hopes to encourage the creativity of the human spirit, and to enrich the cultural life of the Pasadena community.

Art Center has been a recipient of Pasadena Art Alliance grants since 1976, with totals gifts exceeding $620,000.

“These grants from the PAA have made a tremendous impact on our programs here at the College,” says Vice President and Director of the Williamson Gallery Stephen Nowlin. “Fine Art Department Chair Laurence Dreiband and I are both grateful and honored to have partnered with this important organization over the years.”

Wendee Lee: Celebrating Life Through Sunday’s 5K

When Product Design alumna and faculty member Wendee Lee decided to get back into running last fall, and began training for the Rose Bowl 5K, she found that it wasn’t as easy as it used to be.

Lee

“It’s not like I’ve been a jock or very athletic for all my life,” Lee explains, “and it’s been hard this time around. Training has been a test not only of my legs and lungs, but of my will as well.”

Yet she found a deep and unwavering inspiration from an unexpected source: Lee is running to celebrate and honor the memory of fellow alumnus and faculty member Norm Schureman.

“I found a great deal of strength from the idea of running to honor Norm’s legacy and to help spread word about his memorial scholarship,” she said. Because of this, she wanted to run a race specifically in Pasadena, and the Rose Bowl 5K fit the bill and time frame.

Lee’s asking supporters to donate to Schureman’s Memorial Scholarship fund as a way to both celebrate his life, and help ensure that his legacy continues.

She’s seen first-hand the power of scholarships to change lives. As a faculty member, she’s seen students struggle to find the financial means to continue their education, and when Lee was a student herself at Art Center she had to take a leave for a year for financial reasons.

“The Norm Schureman Memorial scholarship is particularly important to me as a Product Design alum and faculty member,” Lee explains. “I had Norm as an instructor, and was lucky enough to have him as a colleague as well. It means so much to know this scholarship will help future Product Design students.”

Lee supported by many across the College. “The Product Design Department is extremely proud of Wendee, and grateful for her commitment to raising scholarship for the Norm Schureman Memorial Scholarship,” says Karen Hofmann.  “We wish her the very best on her run this weekend, and ask that our Art Center community helps support Wendee through contributing to the scholarship fund.”

The Rose Bowl 5K is this Sunday, Feb. 6. Here’s how you can support Lee: Visit Art Center’s donation page, scroll to “Area of Support / Degree Program Scholarships,” and select the Norman Schureman Memorial Scholarship. All donations will help. At the very bottom, under “Confirmation,” add words of encouragement in the “Additional Comments’” section for Lee (such as, “In support of runner Wendee Lee!”), so that she can acknowledge your support of both her run and of the scholarship.

Besides raising money for the scholarship, what are Lee’s personal goals for Saturday’s race?

“I just want to finish strong and enjoy the race and being at and in the Rose Bowl,” she says. “I’ve already regained my joy of running—so really, the rest is all gravy.”

Donate to the Norm Schureman Memorial Scholarship online today.

Or, mail your donation.

West Coast Bright Design Challenge Brings Scholarships to Art Center

In December, five Art Center students were awarded generous scholarships through the inaugural West Coast Bright Design Challenge.

Sponsored by the National Association for Surface Finishing (NASF), the West Coast competition was co-sponsored by the Metal Finishing Association of Southern California (MFASC).

The West Coast Bright Design Challenge was incorporated into last term’s Material Explorations class, led by Art Center instructors Catherine McLean and Krystina Castella. A transdisciplinary team made up of Product Design, Environmental Design, Fine Art and Graduate Industrial Design students spent the term learning about surface finishing technologies and applications, and worked with local electroplating companies to enhance their understanding of the process. Students were challenged to create innovative works utilizing these technologies.

At the end of the class, students presented finished 3-D prototypes and presentations to a panel of faculty and MFASC judges. The students with the top three concepts as judged by the panel were each awarded $5,000 scholarships, and two additional students received honorable mentions and $2,500 scholarships.

Scholarship Winners:

  • Viirj Kan, Environmental Design: $5,000 Prize
  • Carlos Vides, Environmental Design: $5,000 Prize
  • Ed Schofield, Graphic Design: $5,000 Prize
  • Byron Wilson, Product Design: $2,500 Prize
  • Ji Hyun Lee, Product Design: $2,500 Prize

Art Center and the MFASC were thrilled with the collaboration and plan to continue the West Coast Bright Design Challenge in 2011. Congratulations to the student winners!

(Pictured, from left to right: Edward Schofield, $5,000 scholarship award recipient; Virginia Kan, $5,000 scholarship award recipient; Bryan Leiker, K&L Anodizing; Carlos Vides, $5,000 scholarship award recipient; Dan Cunningham, MFASC executive director; Alan Olick, MFASC president and president, General Plating Co.; Byron Wilson, $2,500 scholarship award recipient; Ji Hyun Lee, $2,500 scholarship award recipient; Gregg Halligan, former MFASC president.)

Your BlackBerry Can Do What?!

The BlackBerry Empathy concept phone has received a great deal of online buzz this week. Not only is the design striking, but the idea behind the device is quite interesting—it’s designed with an interface that can interpret and respond to the user’s emotions.

The concept was created by two Art Center Product Design students, Kiki Tang and Daniel Yoon (they’ve since graduated), for a RIM BlackBerry sponsored project at the College.

The user wears a ring that collects emotional data and graphically displays the user’s emotional state to their personal connections.

According to Yoon: “Each contact has an avatar that is encompassed by two colored rings.

The inner colored ring shows the contact’s previous emotional state, and the outer ring represents the contact’s current emotional state. It is important to show the shift in emotions in order to see how an event has affected that contact.”

The phone also features an “Emotional Health Chart,” monitoring the user’s emotions over time, and finds patterns in behavior and emotions (for instance, a person’s mood may repeatedly plummet after phone calls from a certain individual).

So what do you think? Revolutionary … or just plain creepy?

(Thanks to Yanko Design for breaking the story. More images on their site.)

Everyone Deserves a Roof—And You Can Help

It was while bicycling from Westwood to the beach in Santa Monica that film producer Peter Samuelson began noticing something disturbing—the number of homeless he passed regularly. He started counting. Sixty-two homeless. Just eight miles.

He began interviewing the homeless to find out more about them, how they lived, and what they needed. He conceptualized a mobile, single-person device that would facilitate recycling (a principal source of income for many homeless) by day, and at night convert into a tent-like enclosure for sleeping, with privacy and storage space. It would be called EDAR, short for Everyone Deserves A Roof.

Samuelson approached Art Center to sponsor a studio to design the EDAR. Students Eric Lindeman and Jason Zasa designed the product, and have been working pro bono on the project since. EDARs are given free of charge to homeless individuals who are best able to benefit from their recycling and shelter capabilities. But EDARs don’t come cheap. Each one costs around $500 to produce.

For the next four days, Tonic.com is sponsoring a campaign to raise funds for 10 EDARs. That’s a roof over 10 homeless Angelenos.

Watch the L.A. Times video below to see the EDAR out in the field.

From Tonic.com’s article: The final EDAR design boasts a 7-foot-long mattress among an interior high enough for residents to sit up. The EDAR units live at shelters, soup kitchens, day centers, churches, mosques or vacant scraps of land throughout the Los Angeles area and are distributed free of charge, as resources allow. “We give the units to shelters and they give them to specific clients,” explains Samuelson. “The benefit is that they have an ongoing social services. You can push it wherever you want and you can sleep in it wherever you want, and you have to come back once a week, have a shower, have lunch, meet with your supervisor, etc. there’s ongoing counseling.”

Donate to the Tonic.com campaign.

Learn more:

Grant to Create New Demonstration Shop

The Model Shop is one of the busiest areas of campus, buzzing with activity around the clock. The shops are where virtually all our students—from Product Design to Fine Art—learn to build models and use a variety of skills such as woodworking, metal fabrication, vacuum forming, plastic sheet fabrication, fiberglass and composite skills.

Work is already underway on the new shop

As Art Center’s student population has grown, however, space in the Model Shop has become more limited.

Luckily, a generous $100,000 grant from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation is creating a demonstration shop, where students from all majors will have their first experience with power tools under the watchful eyes of their instructors.

The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Demonstration Shop will be equipped with miniature and model-scale tools, and having this additional shop will enable the Model Shop to be used primarily as a production facility.

“The Parsons Demo Shop will further enhance Art Center’s level of instruction, allowing us to provide students with greater knowledge and flexibility in the types of projects they’re tackling in earlier terms,” explained Wendy Adest, Chair of Art Center’s Integrated Studies Department.

“When the Demo Shop is not in use as a classroom, Industrial Design and other students may use it as an additional shop and work space. The purchase of model-scale tools compliments the current array of equipment we already have, and will allow all students access to appropriate tools for their projects, regardless of major. The Parsons grant also funds needed upgrades to classroom 229, as well as creating a clean space for our popular rapid prototyping equipment. We are all very grateful to The Parsons Foundation for their generosity and for recognizing the value of such a venture.”

Work is already underway on the new shop, which is expected to be functional in January with a formal dedication to take place in the spring.

Celebrating the Creative Spirit Through Scholarships

On Saturday, October 16, the College celebrated its 80th anniversary with a special event raising money for scholarships.

Art Center at 80: Celebrating the Creative Spirit commemo­rated Art Center’s distinguished 80-year history and celebrated the ingenuity and integrity of our many students, alumni and faculty.

The inaugural Creative Spirit Awards were awarded to four extraordinary alumni—industrial designer Yves Béhar, introduced by David De Rothschild; automotive designer Frank Stephenson, introduced by David Gooding; blockbuster filmmaker Zack Snyder, introduced by Graduate Broadcast Cinema Department Chair Robert Peterson; and contemporary artist Pae White, introduced by Jeffrey Deitch.

The funds raised from the event will be used to create named scholarships in recognition of the honored alumni, as well as support general scholarships for students in Art Center’s undergraduate, graduate and Public Programs. This support will enable our students to fully realize their potential, regardless of their financial means.

Enjoy the slideshow of images from the event below.