Category Archives: News

Speed making: Art Center students make a clean sweep in Dyson’s rapid prototyping workshops

Before James Dyson first mesmerized TV viewers with his early demonstrations of his sleekly designed and innovatively engineered vacuum cleaner, capable of coaxing the dirt from off any surface, home cleaning devices were many things but sexy wasn’t one of them. But after Dyson’s invention captured the popular imagination (not to mention a landfill’s worth of grit and grime) and became the industry standard for home suction, consumers’ perceptions (and expectations) of vacuums were forever altered, in terms of both performance and prettiness.

Though such paradigm shifting innovations are dependent upon a mysterious combination of luck, timing, research and inspiration. The Dyson company has continued to expand upon its success by upholding its high standards for innovative design and engineering. Cultivating the next generation of design innovators is another vital part of the company’s forward-thinking ethos. To that end, the James Dyson Foundation has been rewarding ground-breaking feats of creative engineering with the James Dyson Award, created in 2002, which offers a $45,000 prize to a design that “solves a problem.”

The foundation has recently started seeding the field by conducting design engineering workshops with K-12 students in Chicago. Last week that strategy graduated to the college level, when a team of Dyson engineers lead Art Center students from three departments — Transportation, Product Design and Graduate Industrial Design — in an exercise testing their teamwork, problem-solving, creativity and craftsmanship.

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Chatting with the creator and recipient of the Hoffmitz|Kondrup Excellence in Typography Award

Alex AristeiLike most dedicated Art Center instructors, Professor Gloria Kondrup (MFA ’93 Graphics/Packaging) is always looking for creative ways to encourage, inspire and support her students. In 2013, she and legendary Graphic Design instructor Professor Leah Hoffmitz Milken established the Hoffmitz|Kondrup Excellence in Typography Award. Created as part of their Legacy Circle membership with a gift from the Lowell Milken Family Foundation, the Award is given once each year to an upper-term Graphic Design student who demonstrates excellence in typography across all media.

We brought Kondrup and first-ever Award recipient Quinton Larson together to chat about the award and their love of typography.

Art Center:  Gloria, what was the motivation behind creating the Hoffmitz|Kondrup Excellence in Typography Award?

Gloria Kondrup: Leah and I share a love of type and language. As instructors we regularly saw students struggle financially to stay in school. The Award is a way to celebrate typography while providing meaningful financial support to a top Graphic Design student.

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Reflecting on African American History Month’s many shades of meaning to students of art and design

Illustration of Dominican fruit by Medar de la Cruz

Illustration of Dominican fruit by Medar de la Cruz

“One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W.E.B.  Du Bois (1868-1963)

Before coming to Pasadena I rarely thought about how significant the color of my skin was to my everyday life. I was raised in a neighborhood in Miami, Florida where I was part of a majority consisting of residents who were either immigrants, multi-lingual or people of color.

Medar de la Cruz

Medar de la Cruz

But when I came to Art Center I realized I no longer fit in as easily. It was here that I was first asked: “Are you black?” This made me realize that race was going to make an impact on my experiences. It’s normal for people to be affected by stereotypes and visual representations. And it’s normal to make assumptions about someone by the color of their skin. So when I was asked this, I responded, “Yes…I mean I’m not white. My parents are Dominican, my ancestors are African, and I was born in America. So technically that makes me African American as well.” I learned that question alone helps me define who I am.

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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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A young Art Center film student finds her tribe at Sundance 2014

Second term Film student, Laura Holliday (left) poses at Sundance with her high school mentor, Betty Bailey

Second term Film student, Laura Holliday (right) poses at Sundance with her high school mentor, Betty Bailey

I always assumed I had no business attending large prestigious film festivals until I had a movie showing there. So, as an undergraduate film student in only my second term at Art Center, I figured it would be a long time before I ended up at one of them. However, after getting the opportunity to attend the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, I can say confidently that any film student or movie lover has a place there, and can benefit boundlessly from being immersed in a scene ripe with creative energy and opportunities to connect.

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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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Major studios: Touring Fine Art and Illustration’s new digs at 870 South Raymond Avenue

This is the first in a two-part series tracking the impact of Art Center’s newest academic facility on the two departments it houses: Fine Art and Illustration.

A man bursts through the gleaming glass doors at 870 South Raymond Avenue in Pasadena looking confused, harried and hurried. Fine Art faculty member (and former interim department Chair) Tom Knechtel, pauses mid-sentence and offers an answer before the man can blurt out his question. “You must be looking for the post office,” says Knechtel, who spearheaded the department’s participation in the renovation of this former postal sorting facility before newly installed Chair Vanalyne Green took the helm. “This is Art Center.”

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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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