This past spring, three students working in different disciplines (Photography, Graduate Transportation Design and Interaction Design) bravely chose to accept the challenge/opportunity (those last two words may as well be permanently fused—no slash necessary— when it comes to artistic endeavors) to reveal the agony and the ecstasy, the challenges and the epic fails that go into conceiving and creating a project over the course of a term. They had enlisted in Art Center’s ongoing collaboration with Myspace to highlight Art Center’s unique approach to creativity and diligently, digitally tracked his/her progress with a trio of videos shot at the beginning, middle and end of the creative journey.
Tag Archives: MySpace
Check out these new student videos from our stellar Myspace occupiers
Roman Vargas, Photography and Imaging – second round from Art Center College of Design on Myspace.
Shortly after the Spring 2014 term passed its halfway point, our participating students (Myspacers?) produced a new set of videos tracking their progress on the path toward creative completion.
Starting a project is never easy. And finishing it is, arguably, even harder. But let’s not underestimate the challenges involved in persisting through the obstacle course of roadblocks artists often face once they’re deep enough into a project that starting over isn’t an option, and the finish line isn’t yet in sight.
Check out the latest videos from Art Center’s Myspace occupants
Update: Shortly after the Spring 2014 term passed its half-way point, our participating students (Myspacers?) produced a new set of videos tracking their progress on the path toward creative completion.
Starting a project is never easy. And finishing it is, arguably, even harder. But let’s not underestimate the challenges involved in persisting through the obstacle course of road-blocks artists often face once they’re deep enough into a project that starting over isn’t an option and the finish line isn’t yet in sight.
This extraordinary set of videos (featured on our Myspace page) offers a snapshot of the breathtaking range of creative activity happening at Art Center on any given day.
Photography student Roman Alexander Vargas takes us deeper into his sources of inspiration (Nan Goldin, primarily) for the very personal photo essay he’s creating as he chronicles his initiation into drag queen culture.
Interaction Design student, Inae Song, delivers a dynamic illustration of the iterative process involved in redesigning an interactive digital destination for AIGA, the American professional association for design professionals. For a young designer proving her mettle, it’s hard to think of tougher crowd to please than the members of AIGA. But Song remained undaunted and produced some incredibly compelling work that plays like a tutorial in website design.
Graduate Transportation Design Student, Nish Kamath, bowed out of this step in the process and will rejoin us with a final video revealing the finished product he creates based on his research into traffic patterns in the developing world.
Each of these students defies and exceeds any and all expectations they set forth in their initial videos, leaving us rapt in anticipation of their final installations. Stay tuned.
Last October, Art Center formed an alliance with the newly relaunched Myspace platform, which had reinvented itself as a social network for creative types. Myspace’s elegant interface seemed custom designed for the Art Center community, with each user profile centered around a portfolio of images and videos that comprise the user’s identity by showcasing the evolution of imagination and innovation. In other words, if Mark Zuckerberg had been a student at Art Center, not Harvard, Facebook might have looked a lot like the current iteration of Myspace.
Because Art Center is known for its students’ enterprise and productivity, that creative rigor became the focal point for this partnership. To illustrate this dedication, we recruited four students from four different disciplines (Product Design, Graphic Design, Illustration and Film) and asked them to document their creative process over the course of the term as they complete a project. The results were as inspiring as they were fascinating, providing a panoramic view of the geyser of creativity that is Art Center.
Art Center’s first Myspace occupation concludes. Prepare for phase 2!
We came. We saw. We influenced change as we learned to create.
Beginning last October, we enlisted four Art Center students to lead the charge in a week-long homepage takeover of the recently relaunched Myspace. The first-wave social network had reinvented itself as a community and breeding ground for artists and creative types of all stripes to exchange work, feedback and inspiration in the digital sphere. In other words, Myspace had become a sandbox custom-built for Art Center students and alums. And, as is our way, we came ready to play.
View from the Bridge: Saluting graduating students and Art Center’s social impact on healthy drinking water and food
A Balde Movil prototype is put to the test in Altos del Pino, Bogota, Colombia.
The Fall 2013 term culminated last weekend with our Grad Show—an unqualified success attracting hundreds of industry representatives—and the arrival of our students’ families on campus for graduation. It was my great pleasure to meet many of them and share in their excitement and pride.
I began this weekend’s ceremonies by reading Everything is Waiting for You by David Whyte. An ode to the creative power of community, this poem was born surprisingly out of a moment of deep grief for the author, which makes its vibrant call to action all the more remarkable. The work begins with a warning of isolation—“Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone”—moves to an acknowledged tension of individual identity in the crowd—“Surely, even you, at times, have felt … the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice”—and concludes with an exultant celebration of discovery and the power of entering the “conversation”—“The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink” and, ultimately, “Everything is waiting for you.”
I shared this poem because I want our graduating students to find the strength to face what is calling them and recognize that they are surrounded by an astonishing depth and plethora of life. I want them to celebrate where the new edges meet and, as the poem suggests, believe they can change the world by their attentive presence.
Our students’ work offers ample evidence that this is all very much underway.
Myspace takeover 2.0: New videos track students’ creative progress and problems
Art Center invades Myspace homepage
Update: Our quartet of students leading our Myspace occupation has produced a new batch of posts — three videos and one written narrative. Visit our Myspace profile for the latest news on how these artists and designers are devising solutions to the roadblocks and detours they encounter en route to their destination: creating something of lasting value that didn’t exist before.
Space. Whether it comes in the form of a blank canvas, an empty sound stage, a blinking cursor on a computer screen or a room of one’s own — space itself has always been fundamental to the act of creation. Art Center has long provided that space for its community of compulsively creative forward-thinking doers and makers, united by a desire to disrupt the status quo with explosive feats of imagination and artistry.
At its most basic level, it’s an invitation to create, explore and invent. And put simply, artists need their space. This was the operative principle behind the supernova success of Myspace, the 1.0 generation social network that became a hub where music lovers connected to their favorite bands. Ten years later, Myspace has reinvented itself, beginning with its June 2013 relaunch, as a social network “purpose-built to empower an infinitely expanding creative community.” The new Myspace has been designed around 21st Century creators’ needs to “connect, make, discover, collaborate, promote and expand.”
And what better place to seed that artistic ecosystem than the hothouse of creativity that is Art Center? So, for the next week, Art Center’s unique approach to bringing audacious ideas to fruition will receive unprecedented exposure as it stages an occupation of the MySpace homepage, which has a massive global reach of 35 million users.
Design gurus from Art Center, Facebook and MySpace share trade secrets on the past, present and future of web design
Marshall Rake, Maria Giudice and John Chambers at 3X3. Photo by Chuck Spangler.
Ask a group of web designers to describe the state of internet aesthetics and you’re likely to get as many answers as there are designers. There are few working environments more fluid than the digital domain, a kind of primordial soup where new innovations and ideas constantly bubble up, creating a rapidly evolving field where the rules of engagement are constantly shifting.
However, the most recent installment of Art Center’s 3X3 lecture series, Web Design: Past, Present and Future (held on the evening of June 26 at the College’s Hillside campus) made some major strides toward delivering a clear picture of how to best navigate and succeed in this nebulous arena. The event featured a trio of design luminaries — Art Center faculty member John Chambers, Facebook Director of Product Design, Maria Giudice and MySpace Creative Director (and Art Center alum) Marshall Rake – each of whom brought an array of diverse professional experiences to bear on a specific phase of the state of the art of web design.
Chambers kicked off the proceedings by offering a longitudinal perspective of digital design, from its primitive beginnings (back in the 1980’s) through its rough infancy (when nobody believed it would survive) to the restless adolescent it has become today. The popular web design instructor harkened back to a time when designers had very few tools with which to ply their trade beyond simple HTML code, which, he pointed out, remains the through-line connecting the web’s earliest iterations and the complex motion-graphics enabled sites of today.
Maria Giudice then took the stage, donning a headset and unleashing a dynamic presentation that could have easily been mistaken for a TED Talk on the rise of web design in tech circles. (That’s no coincidence given that she’s no stranger to the TED stage). Guidice described her career trajectory, which began in print, where she redesigned the PacBell yellow pages before migrating to the web and launching her own design firm, Hot Studio, which she recently sold to Facebook, where she now works as the social network’s design guru.
Giudice strongly emphasized the notion that we’re in the midst of a tectonic shift, from an entrepreneurial culture centered on engineering expertise to one driven by design innovation. “When Facebook acquired us, it was a declaration that designers have value too,” said Giudice. “Engineers used to have all the currency. But companies are making an investment in design. I think we’re going to see the rise of the DEO – leadership by design. They’re going to be the future leaders of companies. You have to think and act like a designer to unlock innovation.”
Graphic Design alum Marshall Rake followed Giudice and echoed some of her thoughts about how designers must respond to the explosion of content generation by taking a curatorial approach to their web presence (think: Pinterest). He also emphasized the idea that the future of web design has yet to be invented and encouraged aspiring designers to experiment and expand upon what’s already been created.
“On the web your creations are always on the brink of being discovered,” said Rake. “Three things to think about with every web design challenge are how to simplify, organize and contextualize information.” Following his brief, high-decibel video montage of some of the recent work he’s done for MySpace, Rake ended the evening with an imperative to future designers: “We have a crazy opportunity in front of us,” he insisted, as a mischievous smile spread across his face. “The web is a place we can experiment because so much stuff doesn’t exist yet. It’s our job to go out there and detonate.”