Art Center Graduates Earning Up to $25,000 More

Coroflot.com Survey Respondents Show Art Center Grads Making More Compared to Other Art Schools

Coroflot.com infographic of median graduate earnings

Coroflot.com’s recent 2013 Creative Employment Snapshot survey shows that of the 10 most represented U.S. colleges and universities that survey respondents attended, graduates from Art Center College of Design earn salaries that range on average from $66,000 to $124,000, or $25,000 more on average than graduates from competing colleges and universities. This goes for both recent grads and industry veterans.

Art Center graduate earnings were compared against similar schools, including Rhode Island School of Design, Rochester Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute, College for Creative Studies, Academy of Art University, School of Visual Arts, Parsons New School, University of Cincinnati and Savannah College of Art and Design.

In addition to earnings, the survey included infographics that show which U.S. cities have the highest concentration of working creative professionals, the job titles with the highest salary ranges and freelance rates, company benefits, how graduates are landing their jobs, and how advanced degrees pay off. Since 2001, Coroflot has collected and reported salary information from thousands of design and creative professionals worldwide.

Launched in 1997 by the team behind Core77, Coroflot is a career and community site made for creative professionals by creative professionals. Coroflot.com connects fellow designers with career opportunities by creating better professional experiences, in areas like industrial design, 3D modeling, architecture, fashion, illustration, graphic design, user experience and more.

Learn more about the survey results at Coroflot.com.

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Jackie Robinson Movie Features Concept Art by Alumnus Brandon Gonzales

This week, Warner Bros. film 42 opens in theaters, showcasing concept art and matte paintings by Art Center alumnus Brandon Gonzales, Entertainment Design class of 2011.

Directed by Brian Helgeland and starring Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford, the film is about the life of baseball player Jackie Robinson. 42 focuses on the 1946 deal that signed Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African-American player to break the baseball color line.

Movie poster for 42

Gonzales created the matte painting that became the movie poster art for the Jackie Robinson film 42.

“Before we even started, I did a lot of concept work on what the stadium could look like by researching black-and-white images of those stadiums,” said Gonzales. “This way the director and production designers would be confident we could make the stadiums look like they did when [Robinson] actually played there.”

One of the matte paintings he worked on became the final one used in the movie poster. “It was one of the main shots I worked on,” said Gonzales. The final picture shows baseball player Pee Wee Reese with his arm wrapped around Robinson on the field.

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Red Hen Press Event Features Art Center Faculty Member Lita Albuquerque

Stars will align on Art Center’s South Campus rooftop on Tuesday, April 23, when poets and artists come together for a special event focused on separate projects exploring Antarctica created by Katharine Coles and Lita Albuquerque. Coles, Utah Poet Laureate Emeritus, and Albuquerque, Art Center Graduate Art faculty member, will be joined by Poetry Foundation President and Red Hen poet John Barr. Hosted by Red Hen Press, an organization committed to publishing works of literary excellence, supporting diversity and promoting literacy in our local schools, the event will also feature a poetry reading by Barr.

Lita Albuquerque in Antarctica

Lita Alburquerque installing STELLAR AXIS in 2006.

The Earth Is Not Flat (Red Hen Press, 2013) by Coles was inspired by her trip to Antarctica funded by the National Science Foundation. Filled with poetry that enters the infinite space/time continuum that is the southern bowl of the planet, The Earth Is Not Flat both observes and engages the idea of what the environment of the South Pole means as humans encounter it.

Albuquerque created the artwork, Stellar Axis, on the Ross Ice Shelf at the South Pole from Dec. 14-27, 2006, and she provided Red Hen Press with one of the photos of the installation for the cover of Coles’ poetry collection. Stellar Axis is an ephemeral installation of a star map on ice. Albuquerque and her team placed ninety-nine blue spheres on the ice to correspond with the stars above them, stars not visible at that time of year when it was light all the time.

As Albuquerque said, “I am interested in change of scale: how the observer affects the object of observation; space as a void; non-space existing in time… Some brittle stars exist in the Antarctic and Arctic, and some are found even in the deepest parts of the ocean where there is no sunlight. Others have exquisitely developed crystalline lenses, formed from the bone in their skeletons, which focus light inside their bodies and enable them to see. But this is not blackness, it is full of something from long ago with the potential of something yet to be.” [ed. note: Stellar Axis was also featured on the cover of Art Center’s Dot magazine (Spring 2012), which included a feature story on another of Albuquerque’s seminal projects, Spine of the Earth.]

Archetype Press, Art Center’s experimental letterpress workshop overseen by Professor Gloria Kondrup, will be creating limited edition broadsides to commemorate the occasion.

For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Red Hen Press website.

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Dieter Rams to Receive Art Center Honorary Doctorate Degree

Art Center will award legendary designer Dieter Rams an Honorary Doctorate Degree on Sat., April 20 at 4pm at its Spring Term 2013 Graduation. The event is free and open to the public. As chief of design at Braun from 1961 until retiring in 1997, Rams was responsible for innovative design in radios, watches, record players, coffee makers, shavers and other objects that continue to influence functionality and aesthetic in today’s products.

Dieter Rams

Legendary designer Dieter Rams, Braun Chief of Design.

Generations of designers have been inspired by Rams’ work. Apple design chief Jonathan Ive said Apple products could be seen as homage to Rams, who created “surfaces that were without apology, bold, pure, perfectly proportioned, coherent and effortless.”

Art Center student Andrew Kim, who is graduating this year and has been hired to work at Microsoft, said in an article about Art Center and Rams in the March/April issue of Pasadena Magazine that “every child needs a superhero to look up to, and he has been mine.”

In 1980 Rams asked himself: “Is my design good design?” His famous list of “10 principles for good design” values design that is simple, harmonious and timeless. On his tenth principle, Rams said, “Good design is as little design as possible: less, but better, because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.”

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Environmental Design Students Take Top Prize in 2013 LAIAC Competition

Connie Bakshi and John Clark propose design ideas for a new space in the tunnel beneath historic Union Station in Los Angeles

Art Center Environmental Design students Connie Bakshi and John Clark emerged victorious in the Los Angeles Interior Architecture Committee (LAIAC) 21st Annual 1:2 Student Competition, winning accolades, a $10,000 scholarship and valuable exposure in their field.

The high-intensity, industry-juried, one-day charette provides an opportunity for undergraduate students, in teams of two selected by their instructors, from 12 Southern California design schools to have their design ideas critiqued by leading industry professionals and compete for a total of $23,000 in scholarship prizes.

Art Center students Connie Bakshi and John Clark at the LAIAC 21st Annual 1:2 Student Competition.

This year students were asked to design the “Linear Gateway.” Their assignment: Imagine a new space for the 600-foot long tunnel that passes underneath the rail lines at historic Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Transform the existing plain tunnel into a new space that is functional, informative and forward-looking for the city.

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ARTnews Recognizes Williamson Gallery as Shaping Art/Science Movement

In the March 2013 issue of ARTnews Magazine, arts writer Suzanne Muchnic features the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery on the Art Center Hillside Campus and its nearly two decade-long series of exhibitions. The cover story, “Under the Microscope,” also features other leading contributors to the burgeoning art/science movement, noting that “in museums, schools, and research facilities, scientists and artists are swapping methods.”

OBSERVE at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery

Lita Albuquerque's installation "Stellar Suspension" was included in OBSERVE, an Art Center/Caltech-JPL collaboration at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery in 2008.

“Strict old-style boundaries like the ones assumed to exist between art and science are eroding,” said Stephen Nowlin, an Art Center alumnus and founding director of the Williamson Gallery, which opened in 1992. “Traditional dichotomies such as intellect versus emotion, reason versus intuition, and the poetic versus the practical, are becoming less distinct under the influence of unprecedented communication networks and analytical tools that reveal in higher resolution and greater clarity the complex layers of things and ideas.”

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Entertainment Design Presents The Intern Show

Join Entertainment Design students and Chair of Entertainment Design Tim Flattery at the Intern Show on Sun., April 7, 12–5 p.m. on the Hillside Campus.

Entertainment Design

Entertainment Design concept art

The event, open to employers in the film, animation, theme park and gaming industries, showcases second- through seventh-term students looking for summer internships. Students will display environment, character, hardware and story concepts, plus portfolios and sculptures.

Internships are an integral part of the educational experience, and those offered to students in Entertainment Design can lead to lucrative work. Production designers, art directors and other recruiters consistently come to scope out the talent. In the past, students have earned internships at Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Sony, Blizzard, Mirada, 343, Riot Games, Thinkwell and more.

Entertainment Design student Brandon Liao was in his fourth term during last year’s Intern Show when he had the opportunity to talk with an art producer from Riot Games. She was so impressed by his character designs that it led to an internship where he created new champions and costumes, or “skins,” for the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game “League of Legends.” He’s now working at Riot part time. “It’s actually really fun, because every assignment you’re doing something completely different,” said Liao.

RSVP by emailing maritza.herrera@artcenter.edu, or calling 626.396.2464.

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20 Art Center Students Win 2013 ADDY® Awards

Congratulations to the 20 Art Center students and recent alumni who won ADDY® Awards in the 2013 competition! Students received their awards at the ADDY® Gala on March 14 at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood.

Art Center student winners from the 2013 ADDY Awards

Many of the Gold and Silver ADDY winners produced their projects in Film/Sell, a 14-week class where Film and Advertising majors collaborate on spec ads for their reels. During the class, students go through tons of ideas before landing a concept they can take into production.

“We help them point out what works and what doesn’t, and how their concept plays into the overall brand identity of the product they’re promoting,” said Chris Gehl, who teaches Film/Sell alongside Clio award-winner Nir Bashan. “Our intention with Film/Sell is to create a class that we would have liked when we were students,” said Gehl. “It’s my favorite class to teach, and it is the first time in 20 years that a class like this has existed.”

Sponsored by the American Advertising Federation, the ADDY® Awards recognize excellence in the art of advertising, graphic design, web design, illustration and photography. The AAF Student ADDY® Awards Competition is designed specifically for college students.

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Art Center Students Nominated for 34th Annual College Television Awards

UPDATE: On April 25, 2013 the  34th Annual College Television Awards awarded five College Emmys to Art Center students! Congratulations to everyone on their wins – below is a list of winners:

  • Alternative Category: 3rd Place, Filippo Nesci and Tim Hendrix, KOAN Sound – 80′s Fitness
  • Children’s Program Category: 2nd Place, Carlo Olivares Paganoni and Justin Wells, Cardboard Camera
  • Commercial Category: 1st Place, Kathleen Lorden, Kia Soul “Funeral”; 2nd Place, Lizbeth Chappell and Josue Lopez, Uncomfortable Situations; 3rd Place, Ellen Houlihan, Todd Glass for GLSEN

 

Art Center students have been nominated for the 34th College Television Awards, also known as the Student Emmys. This year marks the first time that six students have been nominated in the same year. The nominees will attend the College Emmys Gala Awards on Thursday, April 25, 2013 at the JW Marriot LA Live in Los Angeles.

Lizbeth Chappell, Tim Hendrix, Ellen Houlihan, Kathleen Lorden, Montana Mann and Carlo Olivares Paganoni were nominated in commercial, children’s and alternative categories. All students were nominated along with their respective production teams.

The College Television Awards is a national competition that recognizes excellence in student-produced video, digital and film work. Members of the Television Academy judged entries online, and will announce the winners at the awards ceremony.

Each student had their own story to tell. Mann’s “Obsession” spec commercial for the Calvin Klein men’s cologne examines the question, “what does it mean to be completely intoxicated by someone?”

Lorden’s spec commercial “Funeral” has already won 2012 CLIO® and ADDY® Awards, while “Uncomfortable Situations,” from Chappell, Jamie Yuen and co-producer Josue Lopez, wanted to create an ad for a difficult product. “It’s wild,” said Chappell. “Eagle suits are everywhere until you go looking for one.”

Hendrix created a music video for the song “80s Fitness” by Bristol musicians KOAN Sound with the commissioned help of OWSLA, the same music label as dubstep musician Skrillex.

Paganoni’s short film “Cardboard Camera,” co-produced with Justin Wells, focuses on creative 10-year-old Cameron. Hoping to enter a kids’ film competition, he uses his imagination and the help of two friends to create a movie.

“It was inspired by my own childhood,” said Paganoni. “I created a flat camera made of paper and start ‘imagining’ that I was shooting a movie with it. Since I couldn’t shoot anything, I started drawing the little frames of the movie like storyboards. This was the basis for our story.”

Even before being nominated, Houlihan’s “Todd Glass for GLSEN” PSA was noticed by The Huffington Post and Perez Hilton. Inspired by standup comedian Todd Glass and his decision to come out of the closet on a 2012 episode of the “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast, Houlihan asked Glass to take on the suicide epidemic in the LGBT teen community.

“I pitched Todd on doing a hard-hitting PSA unlike the typical anti-bullying messages we’ve seen before,” said Houlihan. “We wanted to shake people up and be honest about how serious the suicide epidemic facing LGBT youth is, and to show we’re all responsible for our words and how we affect one another.”

Congratulations to all of our Graduate Film Art Center students!

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Art Center in the News, March 2013

In case you missed it, Dotted Line brings you a monthly roundup of media coverage.

From the success of the student-led Dot Independent Film Festival (DIFF | LA) and the rise of 3D printing, to reflections on the life of Mike Kelley and the connections between art and science, catch up on any news you may have missed with our March media roundup.

Mike Kelley in The Wall Street Journal

“In 1987, [Mike Kelley] began teaching at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, a sign among his peers that he had ‘arrived.’”–Kelly Crow writing in the Wall Street Journal. Photographs of Kelley by Grant Mudford in 1989, left, and by Tyler Hubby on December 7, 2011, right.

For the latest Art Center news, follow us on Twitter at @art_center.

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