Category Archives: Uncategorized

Oh, modernist pioneers! Recent grad Ellen Surrey illustrates California’s trailblazing women

Ellen Surrey is a fervent flea market flâneur. “My greatest inspiration comes from American nostalgia, and a single thrift store find can hold so much history,” says the Spring 2014 Illustration graduate whose work is featured above and on the cover of the current issue of Dot magazine.

Her love of Americana is evident throughout her work, including her illustrations of folklore hero Paul Bunyan, a series that marked an artistic turning point for Surrey. “I really pushed myself stylistically and medium-wise and from that point on I started to gain a lot more confidence as an illustrator.”

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Art Center arrives in force at New York Design Week 2014

With New York Design Week in full swing, the city is teeming with design lovers and luminaries seeking a competitive edge on leading talent and trends. Art Center is featured at two major events: the high-profile International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) and WantedDesign. Attracting nearly 30,000 tastemakers in the worlds of interior design, architecture, retail, manufacturing, distribution and developers, ICFF is considered North America’s premiere showcase for contemporary design.

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Grad Trans rolls its first grad off the line, fully equipped to change the future of mobility systems

David Day Lee

Several semesters into Art Center’s Undergraduate Transportation Design program, and after an internship at one of the major automotive design studios in the Los Angeles area, David Day Lee realized that a career as a studio designer wasn’t his calling. He wanted to impact the automotive industry in a more comprehensive way. Lee talked to his professors and other faculty at Art Center about his wider interests—transportation mobility systems, integrated connectivity technology and cross-disciplinary strategic design solutions—and was invited to become the first student in Art Center’s vanguard Graduate Transportation Design program.

The approach would be a systematic one, “where you’re not just designing the vehicle,” Lee says, “but imagining vehicle design in the context of an ecosystem.”

Last week, he became the program’s first graduate. The Dotted Line caught up with him during his final term.

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Ten Art Center “bling nuggets” from Student Leadership Award winner Kristina Marrero

Product Design graduate Kristina Marrero

“I equate designing with cooking,” says Kristina Marrero, who graduated this past Saturday from the Product Design program and also received Art Center’s Student Leadership Award for the Spring 2014 Term. “It’s when I share my creation with others that I see the complete experience come to life.”

Marrero describes herself as an experience crafter, and indeed she crafted an exceptionally full experience at Art Center. She served as Art Center Student Government’s (ACSG) Executive Secretary as well as its Product Design representative.

She attended Tama Art University in Tokyo as part of the Future Craft Student Exchange as well as multiple sessions of the Pensole Footwear Design Academy in Portland, Ore. first as a workshop participant and twice as a teaching assistant.

Marrero interned at both Tesla and at Adidas, participated in several Designstorms, served as co-president of Girls of ID, an industrial design club, and helped many a student elevate their design concepts as a lab assistant in the Color, Material and Trends Exploration Lab.

At graduation, Marrero shared with the audience the following 10 takeaways–or “bling nuggets” as she said her Visual Communication instructor Derek Howard would call them–from her studies at Art Center:

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Oscar Ahoy-a! Grad Film student, Rahat Mahajan’s ‘Istifa’ selected as Student Academy Award finalist

Still from Rahat Mahajan’s Student Academy Award finalist, Istifa

Each year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (aka the organization that hands out the Oscars) receives over 500 submissions from student filmmakers around the world. This past week, Art Center Graduate Film student, Rahat Mahajan’s narrative short, Istifa (Resignation), was selected as a national finalist for the most prestigious prize awarded to student filmmakers.

Please join us in congratulating Rahat, a 5th term student from India. Shortly after hearing the good news, we caught up with Rahat and asked him to share his thoughts on the process of making the film and where he hopes to go from here.

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Hollywood heavyweights duke it out over student talent at Entertainment Design intern show

Early on Sunday morning, the hallways of Art Center were magically transformed into a winding gallery of installations created by sleep-deprived Entertainment Design students. The 49 nervous conceptual artists prepared to show their work to top industry employers shopping for talent to hire as summer interns.

Covering the walls and table tops were prints and displays ranging from environments, architecture and characters, to vehicles and props. The impressive displays all stem from the fertile imagination of students who will go on to create visuals we see in films, video games, animation commercials, TV shows and theme parks.

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Community celebrates new studio spaces, student artists love stronger connection to each other

Ranee Henderson’s life has changed dramatically since the opening of Art Center’s new 870 Building. Since she doesn’t own a car, the 7^th-term Illustration major and Fine Arts minor typically lugged a heavy backpack plus a carry-on bag stuffed with supplies, all while juggling a large canvas, every day on the bus ride from her home in Eagle Rock to Pasadena–where she then boarded the campus shuttle to reach her Hillside destination.

Carrying around all that extra weight is now a thing of the past. Today, Henderson–along with her art supplies–happily occupies one of 47 individual studio spaces in the newest addition to the College’s expanding South campus.

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Art Center and Intel forge an alliance in the war of the wearables

(L-R) Intel’s Steven Holmes, Artefact’s Jennifer Darmour (MFA 05 Media Design Practices), Intel’s Lama Nachman and Karten Design’s Eric Olson (BS 96 Product) at the Connected Bodies symposium

At last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung showed off its upcoming Gear Fit, a wrist-worn device that performs double duty as an activity tracker/personal trainer and as an extension of your smartphone. It’s just the latest salvo in the escalating war of the wearables, a battlefield already crowded with devices from companies like Jawbone, Fitbit, Nike and Pebble, and about to get even hairier with Google and Apple preparing to enter the fray.

While companies were showing off their wearables in Spain, here in Pasadena, Art Center’s graduate Media Design Practices (MDP) and pioneering technology company Intel were exploring the future of the field itself in a public symposium titled Connected Bodies: Imagining New Wearables.

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Student designs the Air Jordans of high performance sailing shoes

Nina Viggi's high performance Dinghy shoe

IDEA gold medalist Nina Viggi’s One Degree High Performance Dinghy Shoe.

Since its inception in 1965, the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) has recognized “positive impact” in design. In 22 years of competition, Art Center students have taken 70 medals in IDSA’s highly competitive International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA).

When IDSA announced the most recent IDEA winners, they included—among Art Center’s eight finalists in the 2013 competition—three medal winners. Graduate Industrial Design student Nina Viggi took home a gold medal for her One Degree High Performance Dinghy Shoe, designed for competitive sailing. Continue reading →

Fine Art student Kristy Lovich to receive the Student Leadership Award

Fine Art student Kristy Lovich on board the Metro. Photo by Jennie Warren.

“My practice as a culture worker is hinged on the belief that art making lives in tandem with social action,” says Fine Art student Kristy Lovich, who this weekend will receive Art Center College of Design’s Student Leadership Award.

Each term, Art Center presents the Student Leadership Award to a deserving student from the College. The award is a distinguished honor granted to a graduating student who exemplifies leadership qualities and accomplishments that stand out above their peers.

Students who receive the Student Leadership Award represent the character, the integrity and the skills that Art Center desires for all students to develop during their time at the College. Recipients must have represented student interests by providing outstanding leadership through broad involvement in Art Center campus life.

Politically engaged and dedicated to creating an artistic community based on a culture of mutual support, Lovich provided a vivid model for how art and design can directly confront today’s crucial issues. “As a student at Art Center, I knew that the rigor of my studies would limit my ability to maintain my activism outside of school,” says Lovich. “The solution to this was to bring my desire for social justice directly into the school community.”

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