Tag Archives: 3×3

Designer Simon Johnston on Factory Records, Q-Tips, lawyers, self-destructing magazines

Simon Johnston with his work "Investigation" at the "PAGES" exhibition opening. Photo: Chuck Spangler

Students recently packed an overflowing Los Angeles Times auditorium for 3×3*: Type Guys, an event that featured three presentations and a lively Q&A with three individuals that have crafted the way we see, understand and interact with typography.

Previously we shared highlights Kyle Cooper‘s and Jeremy Mende‘s presentations. Today we focus on Art Center’s own Simon Johnston.

Johnston was educated at Bath Academy of Art in England and the Kunstgewerbeschule, Basel, Switzerland. In England he founded the design practice 8vo, as well as the influential typographic journal Octavo. Since relocating to Los Angeles in 1989, he has run his own design office, Simon Johnston Design, with a particular emphasis on typography, especially book and catalog work for museums and galleries.

Johnston has taught typography and design at Art Center for 20 years. He is currently faculty director of the print area of emphasis in the Graphic Design department. In addition to his teaching and design practice, he works on his own art and photography projects.

At the event, Johnston touched on a variety of topics, including the importance of typography, working with some of his idols and the minefield of registered trademarks.

Here are just a few of the highlights:

On typography:
There’s an old joke: It’s the scene of an accident, a crowd is gathered around an injured person, and from the back of the crowd a voice is heard, “Let me through! I’m a typographer!” Typography may not be a matter of life and death, but as visible language, it is the key means through which we communicate as a society, and as such it’s the spine that runs through the body of graphic design practice.

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Designer Jeremy Mende on ‘anxious futurism,’ petroleum, biorhythmic data

Jeremy Mende's "100 Years from Now" installation in Rome.

Students packed an overflowing Los Angeles Times auditorium last Thursday night for 3×3*: Type Guys, an event that featured three presentations and a lively Q&A with designers Jeremy Mende, Kyle Cooper and Art Center’s own Simon Johnston—three men that have crafted the way we see, understand and interact with typography.

Last week we gave you highlights from Kyle Cooper’s presentation. Today we focus on San Francisco-based Jeremy Mende, an associate professor of design at the California College of the Arts, where he teaches experiemental typography and critical theory.

In 2000, he founded MendeDesign, a firm that describes itself as creating “unique, poetic and unexpected messages” and that believes that beauty and authenticity have a “critical role in producing things of value and durability.”

Mende has been recognized internationally for his work and has pieces in several collections including at SFMOMA. In 2010-11, he was the Rome Prize Fellow in Design at the American Academy in Rome.

At Art Center, he spoke with students about work he’s created that meet at the “interesection of [his] interest in psychology and [his] interest in design and [his] interest in typography.”

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Calling All Eccentric Types: Andrew Byrom, Gloria Kondrup and Heather van Haaften to Speak at 3×3

"Letter-Box-Kite" by Andrew Byrom.

Each term, Art Center’s Graphic Design department hosts a 3×3, an event in which three local professionals speak on a particular topic.

Tomorrow night’s 3×3, “Eccentric Types,” brings graphic designer Andrew Byrom, Archetype Press director Gloria Kondrup, and creative director Heather van Haaften to the LA Times Auditorium for a stimulating discussion on the wild possibilites of typefaces.

Here’s everything you need to know:

3×3: Eccentric Types

Thursday, June 28th, 7:30pm
Los Angeles Times Media Center (LAT)
Art Center College of Design, Hillside Campus
1700 Lida Street, Pasadena, CA 91103

Andrew Byrom, Graphic Designer, Typeface Designer and Professor
Andrew Byrom is a UK born graphic designer and typeface designer, based in LA. His clients include The New York Times, Penguin Books, The Architecture and Design Museum and Sagmeister Inc. His experimental typography has been featured in numerous design publications including Print Magazine +81, and Creative Review, and has been honored by the AIGA and the TDC.

Byrom is also a Professor at CSULB and has taught at UCLA Extension, Northern Illinois University, as well as Luton University and Central Saint Matrins in the UK. He has given presentations about his approach to design throughout Europe, Asia and the US – including the AIGA Y-Conference, ATypI, TypeCon, The Type Directors Club, Kuala Lumpur Design Week, and TEDx UCLA.

Gloria Kondrup, Archetype Press Director and Professor
Gloria Kondrup has a BA in Fine Art and Art History, and an MFA in Design. Her design interests straddle both 15th and 21st-century technologies and includes an expertise in branding, packaging, and letterpress printing. She currently has the best job in the world. Since 2003, Professor Kondrup has been the Director of Archetype Press at Art Center College of Design, where students enhance their ability to understand the relationship of language and typography, and to explore the creative benefits of an analog technology in the digital landscape. She maintains a consultancy in branding and pursues an interest in language and limited edition fine art books. Her work is in private and institutional collections including AIGA, The Sackner Archives of Concrete and Visual Poetry, The Getty and The Smithsonian.

Heather van Haaften, Creative Director
Heather van Haaften traveled continents in search of unusual typefaces, discontinued letterforms, and illegible ligatures. Her Midwest family printing business served reason to escape the realm of computerized typesetting and discovered the world’s first printed book, the Gutenberg Bible, set in Blackletter metal type. She has worked for Capitol Records and Paramount Television, and resided six years in Germany redesigning three European TV networks before returning to America to redesign HSN, an American cable network. Most recently as Interactive Creative Director, she lead award winning creative teams who delivered 1,500 custom online retail strategies to Fortune 100 companies and connected the brands with the world’s biggest online retailers, Walmart.com, Dell.com, CVS.com to name a few. Her areas of expertise include creative and interactive development, digital content, broadcast design, video production and entertainment graphics.

Heather holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Design from Otis Parsons School of Design. Not a widow, nor an orphan, she eloped in 1995 to Sedona Arizona with Nikolaus Kraemer, a German movie producer. A mother of two bilingual cats, she loves licorice, yoga and Breaking Bad.

“Get Physical” Lecture Now Available on AlwaysOn

Still from Rebeca Méndez' "Recurrence Relation 2" (2011)

Are you still kicking yourself for missing the Graphic Design Department’s 3×3 lecture Get Physical: New Media in Space this past September?

Then stop whatever you’re doing and visit Art Center’s AlwaysOn website, where the entire lecture–comprised of three presentations by media artist and designer Joachim Sauter, Art Center alumna and interdisciplinary artist Rebeca Méndez and contemporary media artist Christian Moeller–has just been been uploaded.

At Get Physical, Sauter, Moeller and Méndez (whose latest work, Quagmire, can currently be seen in Art Center’s WORLDS exhibition) explored ”post-virtual experiences,” those new interactions arising from the fusion of digital media within our built environment.

As might be expected, “post-virtual experiences” mean very different things to each of these three artists. For example, Méndez’ current work-in-progress Circumpolar has her following the Arctic Tern, a small seabird, as it migrates from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Mendez said that with this work she’s aiming not only to capture the bird’s behavior and habitat but to also document the invisible forces–the Sun, the Earth’s magnetism, the oceanic currents–that guide the Tern in its migration.

And the process of capturing nature is also an opportunity for her to reflect on the sublime fragility of life. ”I like spending time in the middle of the tundra, where I’m confronted with the realization that nothing out there wants me to live,” said Méndez of some of her recent works, including Recurrence Relation 2. “They told us going from the sailboat to the zodiac that if we fall in the ice, it’d be better to leave us in the water because we’d last longer than if they pulled us out. We’d last six minutes in the water, three minutes out.”

See all three presentations at Art Center’s AlwaysOn website.

3×3: Get Physical, New Media in Space

Don’t miss the latest 3×3 event: Get Physical, New Media in Space, Thursday, Sept. 29, at 7 p.m. in the Ahmanson Auditorium at Hillside Campus.

The event is hosted by the Graphic Design Department in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut of Los Angeles.

Get Physical, New Media in Space will explore the fusion of digital media with our built environment, providing post-virtual experiences.

The exciting panel will be made up of leading artists of the field: Joachim Sauter, Art Center alumna Rebeca Méndez and Christian Moeller. Graphic Design Chair Nik Hafermaas will moderate the panel.

3×3: Get Physical, New Media in Space
Thursday, Sept. 29, 7 p.m.
Ahmanson Auditorium
Hillside Campus

3×3: Trends in Packaging and Interaction

Tomorrow, join the Graphic Design Department as they present 3×3: Trends in Packaging and Interaction.

Hear from three industry leaders as they discuss how packaging and interaction design are merging, and the entire field of graphic design is shifting. They’ll share their predictions for what to look forward to as design goes beyond the surface.

The speakers are:

  • Chris Hacker, Chief Design Officer, Johnson & Johnson
  • Maggie Hendrie, Strategy Director, UX Designer, Educator
  • James Chu, Product Designer, Branding Strategist, Educator

Don’t miss this great event!

3×3: Trends in Packaging and Interaction
Wednesday, July 13, 7:30 p.m.
Los Angeles Times Media Center
Hillside Campus

3×3 Tonight!

Don’t miss tonight’s lecture, hosted by the Graphic Design Department: 3×3: Transmedia Design: Communication Design Across Space, Time and Behavior.

Hear from three pioneers who navigate uncharted communication design territory. They engage space through narrative environments, engage time through motion and behavior programming and engage language in traditional and interactive formats and combine all of this into compelling transmedia design.

Tonight’s lecture features:

Aaron Koblin, an artist specializing in data visualization. His work has been recognized by the National Science Foundation, and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Koblin is technology lead of Google’s Creative Lab in San Francisco, and shows work at international exhibitions and galleries.

Dan Goods, visual strategist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he has drilled a hole into a grain of sand, created installations out of aerogel, and is currently trying to put an object on a spacecraft going to Jupiter. In the evenings he works on commissions, such as eCloud.

Brad Bartlett, who earned his master’s degree in design from Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work at Cranbrook exploring the relationship of media and culture was presented at MIT and Fabrica of Benetton in Italy. He was selected as New Visual Artist by Print Magazine before establishing a small, multidisciplinary design studio in Los Angeles in 1999. In Art Center’s Graphic Design program, he teaches the wildly successful Typography 4: Transmedia studio.

The lecture, held in the L.A. Times Media Center, begins at 7 p.m. and is open to the public.

3×3: Transmedia Design: Communication Design Across Space, Time and Behavior
Thursday, Feb. 24, 7-9 p.m.
L.A. Times Media Center

3×3*: Starting and Running a Graphic Design Business

Each term, Art Center’s Graphic Design Department brings together three LA-based design professionals to discuss a particular topic. This term’s panel will be alum designers Yolanda Santosa (FerroConcrete), Chris Dooley (National Television) and Tatiana Redin Wyden (Creable).

Find out their thoughts on running a design business, maintain a personal-work life balance, and what they look for when hiring designers at this free public event.

3×3*: Starting and Running a Graphic Design Business
Wednesday, March 10, 7:30-9 pm
LA Times Media Center, Hillside Campus