Category Archives: Transportation Design

Street to Screen Car Classic 2014 is around the corner. Start revving your engines!

On Sunday, October 27 2013, Pasadena’s rustic hillside played temporary home to an array of fierce creatures nonnative to these bucolic climes. On Art Center’s lawn alone, there were reported sightings of Barracudas, Mako Sharks, Stingrays, Cobras, Beetles and a herd of Italian bulls of the Lamborghini variety.

Last year’s “Inspired by Nature” theme of Art Center’s annual classic car confab inspired the above video, directed by Graduate Film student Tatyana Kim. And we have little doubt that this year’s version of the event, “Street to Screen,” celebrating the automotive stars of screens big and small, will similarly gun engines, spark plugs, charge batteries and maybe even catalyze converters.

This year’s fleet of cinematic concept cars will include Batmobiles through the ages, Bumblebee from the franchise (directed by Art Center alum, Michael Bay) and Herbie the Love Bug, among many others. Festivities kick off on October 26th at 11 am at Art Center’s Hillside campus. Advance tickets and information can be found here.

For more than 10 years, Art Center’s Car Classic has examined automotive culture and vehicle architecture through the lens of design. More than just another high-profile car show, this popular public event celebrates the very best in automotive design, showcasing the College’s strong ties to industry and honoring many of our noteworthy alumni.

This year, transportation designers, car collectors, filmmakers and auto and lifestyle enthusiasts will converge at Art Center’s annual event to hear from and meet the people who design the vehicles that we love to see cruising Sunset Boulevard, coasting along scenic byways or roaring to life on the big screen. This daylong celebration will provide attendees an up-close-and-personal look at a carefully curated selection of innovative vehicles, rare automobiles and stunning concept cars.

For those who can’t attend, keep your eyes on this space for our own video tribute to the icons of LA’s two defining industries, each dedicated to stylishly transporting us into other realities, literally and figuratively.

Money magazine ranks Art Center grads among the most employable in the nation

 

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Alumnus Dan Goods, Visual Strategist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stands with “Refraction,” an artwork he created with fellow alum David Delgado.

An Art Center education doesn’t come cheaply. It requires a high-deposit, high-return investment of resources, tapping reserves of creativity and cash. But Art Center students know these initial sacrifices will pay off down the road when they emerge with an education custom designed to equip them for creatively and financially fulfilling careers. Money magazine reinforced the College’s reputation for boosting its grads’ professional prospects this week when it ranked Art Center third on its list of 25 of the best college values.

In response to millions of parents seeking colleges that strike a balance between affordability and professional prestige  and training, Money devised a new tool to measure a college’s ROI.  The new ranking places Art Center at number three on its “Value All-Star” list since, according to the editors’ careful calculations, Art Center alumni exceed expectations when it comes to earning. Money found that our grads take home an extra $12,000 per year early in their careers, using criteria based on three equally weighted categories: quality, affordability and career outcomes. The magazine defines outcomes almost entirely in terms of how much students earn after graduation.

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Grad Show Preview: Diving into the Summer 2014 talent pool

Perhaps more than graduation itself, Graduation Show Preview marks the culmination of a student’s years of hard work at Art Center. Each term, on the Thursday before Saturday’s commencement ceremony, the College’s classroom studios, hallways and exhibition spaces come alive with 2D, 3D, digital and other work renowned for both its conceptual rigor and its professional finish. It’s like one giant gallery opening — the Summer 2014 edition brimming with more than 450 invited guests — showcasing some of today’s most innovative and most driven emerging artists and designers.

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Summer 2014: Countdown to commencement!

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Getting ready for Grad Show. Photo: Lucia Loiso

The computer labs are packed. The shops are humming at all hours. Visitors from sponsoring companies and organizations are streaming through campus to attend final presentations. And the Student Gallery is full of projects in and out of the coveted space. These telltale sights and sounds can only mean one thing at Art Center: Week 14 has arrived.

The state of the campus is a visual reminder of the frenetic energy generated by Art Center students sprinting toward finals. The end of the term is here; and for 111 students, this week marks their last. Saturday evening, after countless all-nighters, critiques, finals, internships and hopefully some fun, 100 undergraduate and 11 graduate students will be awarded their degrees. As we count down to commencement, we celebrate these creative and talented individuals who are about to take on the world and honor the great teachers who have guided the way. Here’s the lowdown for the week.

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Not sure what type of design to study? Sample them all in Andrew Hall’s Design 360

Artist and ACN instructor Andrew Hall in his studio. Courtesy of the artist.

Artist and ACN instructor Andrew Hall in his studio. Courtesy of the artist.

For the past four years, artist Andrew Hall has taught Design 360 at Art Center at Night (ACN), Art Center’s continuing studies program. Design 360 gives students a whirlwind tour of many of the major disciplines offered at the College, including: advertising, graphic design, filmmaking, illustration, product design and transportation design.

In the class, he asks his students to imagine a product that “protects something” which can be “something obvious like safety goggles” or something more abstract “like a camera, which protects memories.” Then, for the next 12 weeks, students give their product the full treatment—designing everything for it from a logo to a storyboard for a 30-second commercial—and then present it to the class, complete with drawings that show their process. “The presentation teaches the importance of really owning your concept.”

Hall finds the diversity of his students particularly inspiring—some take Design 360 when they’re at a point in their career where “they’re just treading water and need to make a big decision” while others treat the course as a philosophical journey. “Some of them come up with solutions far more cerebral and spiritual than a product you can hold in your hand.” Continue reading →

August 2014 Alumni Notes

Jennifer Steinkamp's Murmurfication

Jennifer Steinkamp’s Murmuration

Summer 2014 has yielded a bounty of freshly produced works, events and ideas by Art Center alumni. And look for future editions of this dispatch to be equally flush, given July’s bumper crop of kickstarter campaigns. Read on to learn more…and get in on the fun(ding).

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Think Cadillac: Trans alum Christine Park on breaking into luxury car design

 

Christine Park at the Cadillac Design Studio in Michigan. (Photo courtesy of General Motors)

Christine Park at the Cadillac Design Studio in Michigan. (Photo courtesy of General Motors)

Christine Park began her career in the highly competitive field of luxury car design with an internship at the GM Advanced Concept Design Studio in Los Angeles. She has been with General Motors ever since. Now lead exterior designer at the Cadillac Design Studio in Michigan, Park’s design projects include interior themes for the 2013 and 2014 Cadillac XTS and the Cadillac CIEL convertible.

Everything, Park said, starts with the customer.

“We look for inspiration in the customer’s needs and wants. We also look for artistic inspiration: we look at internet blogs and magazines, we go to museums.” Among the many design sketches that result, a very few are chosen to be rendered by clay sculptors as 3D scale models, Park said. Some of these will be turned into full size clay models. The whole process is clay,” she explained, “because clay is easy to put on and take off and it’s very flexible.

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Art Center in the News | July 2014

 

National Geographic featured Art Center alumna xxx and her award-winning device to detect hearing loss being tested on a baby at Vaani Vilas Hospital, Bangalore. Photo: ©Rolex Awards/ Ambroise Tézenasphoto

National Geographic featured Art Center alumna Neeti Kailas’s award-winning device to detect hearing loss being tested on a baby at Vaani Vilas Hospital, Bangalore. Photo: ©Rolex Awards/ Ambroise Tézenas

From National Geographic to The Huffington Post; from stylish sensors for your fingernails to a design to detect deafness in newborns, Art Center’s students, faculty, staff and alumni are media headliners. Click a few of the links below to get a taste of recent coverage about diverse subjects including a mobile home tour through Detroit, origami art on speed, smart growth for future generations of artists and designers, the benefits of naps and much more.

June 2014 alumni news and notes

Photograph by Damon Casarez for the New York Times

Photograph by Damon Casarez for the New York Times

From The New York Times to Esquire, from Cannes to the Venice Biennale — Art Center alums have been busy making, making headlines and making their talents known within some of the world’s most prestigious events, platforms and publications. In addition to this primer on their accomplishments, we’re also inviting the Art Center alumni community to nominate candidates for this year’s Art Center Alumni Awards. Read on to learn more.

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