Tag Archives: Student Work

Imagining New Worlds with Patrick Hruby

Last year we told you about the amazing collaboration between Venice-based Blik and Art Center Illustration alumnus Patrick Hruby.

We’re excited to announce that Blik has just launched a new wall graphic designed by Hruby. The graphic, Imaginary Castle, is the same design that Hruby created for his final project at Art Center, on display in the Student Gallery last year.

Hruby first paired up with Blik in 2010 when he was a graduating student and Art Center’s Spring 2010 valedictorian. Earlier in the year, Blik had mentored Hruby’s fellow Art Center peers in the Advanced Illustration Studio class. 

This serendipitous connection led Hruby to turn to Blik to manufacture his final project, Imagine Something Beautiful.

Each year, the Art Center gives the wall in the main school entranceway to one star student to display their final project during Graduation Show. Hruby’s project was selected for the space in spring 2010, and he approached Blik to help execute his vision and overcome the challenge of placing the design on the school’s grad wall. The transformation of Hruby’s illustration into a wall graphic was easy as Imaginary Castle was always conceived as a wall decal.

“I wanted to create a magical place that was large enough to make you feel as if you were there,” Hruby says. “Imaginary Castle pays respects to my Eastern European heritage and grandparents. I’ve always been fascinated with that design aesthetic and wanted to try my hand at it.”

The punchy colors add dimension to the large-scale design, making the decal “pop-off” the wall and appeal to children’s vivid imaginations and fairy tale sensibilities.

“We were captivated by Patrick’s style,” says Blik co-founder Scott Flora. “Imaginary Castle is a vibrant cityscape reminiscent of Mary Blair’s It’s a Small World. With its interesting shapes and modern aesthetic, we envision Imaginary Castle transporting kids into a color-filled playground. Keep your eye on Patrick, he is definitely an illustrator to watch.” 

Imaginary Castle is available in two sizes: a 36-inch wide wall decal and a 6-foot wide wall decal at Blik.

In Case You Missed It

Photo by Eric Curry

As you know, there’s always something going on when it comes to Art Center alumni, students and faculty.

Some of the latest:

Film Students Receive Honors

Our undergrad and graduate film students have been busy—several have garnered awards and recognition for their work recently.

Two Film students won Young Director Awards at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival: Y-C Tom Lee for his AIDS public service announcement and John X. Carey for his Voices From the Field documentary.

The Association of Independent Commercial Producers held their annual AICP Awards Show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on June 7. Numerous film schools across the country competed in the Best Student Commercial category, and seven of the 10 national finalists were current Art Center film students. Undergraduate film major Ian Kammer won the highest honor— Best Student Commercial—with his North Face: Hibernation spot.

Other Art Center student winners included:

Undergraduate Film:
Gevorg Karensky: Adidas – Impossible Is Nothing
Y-C Tom Lee: Gatorade
Ted Marcus: Laphroaig Scotch Whiskey – Winter Revel

Graduate Broadcast Cinema:
Erik Anderson: Red Bull — Small Can of Big Whoop-Ass
Paul Linkogle: Band-Aid – Beginnings
Michael Lutter: Roaring Lion Energy Drink (shown above)

Congrats on these well-deserved honors!

IDB hosts Safe Agua Exhibit in Washington, D.C.


The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is hosting an exhibit on innovative and affordable designs to provide safe water, Internet solutions and entrepreneurship opportunities for people living in poverty.

The Design Innovation with the Base of the Pyramid exhibit will showcase solutions developed by the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para Mi Pais, a non-governmental organization based in Santiago, Chile. Six different safe water solutions developed by Designmatters students in partnership with the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para Mi Pais will be on display. These safe water solutions were developed by connecting design students with families living in poverty with limited access to running water and other basic services. In 2010, these solutions were used to help hundreds of Chileans affected by the earthquake.

Read more: IDB hosts exhibit on innovative design solutions to improve the lives of the poor

MDP Grads Help Define Future of Mobile

Alex Braidwood's Synthetic Din

The L.A. Times Hero Complex blog has a great piece on the evolution of mobile apps, and even better—it features the thesis projects from recent Graduate Media Design grads Alex Braidwood and Scott Liao!

From the article:

Media artists such as Alex Braidwood, 32, are in fact harnessing smart devices as the means to a more aesthetically nuanced end. The Art Center College of Design graduate programmed the iPhone’s built-in camera to function as a sensor that detects blue, red and yellow tones. The Synesthetic Din program then translates the colors into an ever-shifting electronic composition that plays into a user’s ear buds as he or she walks down the street.

“To me the most interesting things about smart phones and iPads is that they have all these capabilities that are just waiting to be glued together in new ways,” says Braidwood. “I like turning these devices into little performance machines.”

Braidwood, who last month earned his master of fine arts in Media Design, notes, “Most apps are commodities that people get either because it helps them do something or it’s some kind of novelty game. But there’s this space in the middle where it’s not about guiding you to the best sushi restaurant in town but more about helping you wander around and discover something new that you did not see or hear before.”

Art Center graduate Scott Liao has similarly toyed with the innards of iPad tablets to create what he calls “enriched narrative.” His Anonymous Triangle piece allows viewers to aim a sensor-rigged iPad at projected short films to trigger back-story texts about the various characters. “With current tablet technologies,” says Liao, 27, “we have the chance to change our viewing behavior from passive to active.”

Read more: Apps evolution: A new wave of digital artists is adding whimsy to mobile gaming

Student Film Wins Art Directors Club Gold and Cannes Award

The following post about Voices From the Field, which we’ve featured here earlier this year, is from the Designmatters blog.

Guest Blogger John X. Carey (Film Department, 8th term) is the recipient of the 2011 Young Director’s Award from the Cannes Film Festival as well as the recipient of the Art Director’s Gold Cube Award for his film, Voices From the Field.

Designmatters put me and two of my fellow classmates at Art Center College of Design into a real world re-branding situation as part of a TDS studio last spring with an international aid organization called Project Concern International (PCI). Kyle Murphy (Film), Jeremy Jackson (Photography & Imaging) and I pitched the idea of shooting a film in Africa about the humanity that PCI was working with everyday and the client decided to go with the idea.

Flying to Africa for a week and shooting the film and subsequently editing the 40 hours of footage down into a digestible five minute commercial pushed me way outside of my comfort zone but I couldn’t help but come away with a fresh perspective on my career, the world, and my place in both.

Our resulting film, Voices From the Field, went on to win an Art Directors Club GOLD Cube, which was a really gratifying way to cap off the entire experience.

Jeremy and Kyle were such amazing students to work with on the film. The job called for them to be both particle technicians and highly creative artists, and they were able hold both in the palm of their hand flawlessly.

The fact that I had such a good crew is just a testament to Art Center and how amazing the students are here.

I highly encourage people to investigate Designmatters and meet the program Director Elisa Ruffino and Vice President Mariana Amatullo, who are two of nicest people I know.

They spend their days helping Art Center students use their smarts, social status and personal voices to better mankind.

Ad Students Take Home the Gold

At the recent One Club student competition award ceremony in New York, three Art Center Advertising students brought home a most prestigious souvenir—a One Club gold pencil.

From left to right: Brandon Grande, Advertising Department Interim Chair James Wojtowicz, Dawn Kim, Josephine Yatar

The award is the ad student equivalent of winning an Oscar. Students Brandon Grande, Dawn Kim and Josephine Yatar worked as a team to develop an integrated branding campaign, NY Feeds NY, for City Harvest, a food donation service that helps feed the homeless in New York.

Art Center also picked up three merit awards for entries by three other teams.

Congrats to all, and be sure to check out all the Art Center winners at the One Club site!

Day in the Life: A Saturday High Alum Shoots for Nike

Angela Choi, as photographed by Olivia Crawford for Nike Sportswear.

With most of us walking around with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter on our phones, it’s no wonder why it has become increasingly difficult to be aware of our own surroundings.

But don’t tell that to Saturday High alumna Olivia Crawford. The Pasadena native recently graduated from Polytechnic School and is now studying art and art history at the University of California, Berkeley. Crawford’s passion for capturing the people and events in her life through photography not only made her a standout in her Saturday High courses, but it also landed her a very cool gig during her last winter break.

An ad agency discovered her work on Flickr and asked her if she’d like to be involved with Nike Sportswear’s “Look of Sport” campaign. The job involved shooting photographs of athletic and stylish individuals from Los Angeles, photographed in a style remaining true to her own aesthetic.

Crawford agreed, and the campaign appeared online last month.

“Olivia is a disciplined, focused and intelligent kid,” says Saturday High instructor David Sotelo, who along with co-instructor Evah Hart, taught Crawford twice in Photography 2. Sotelo recalls Crawford being particularly inspired by Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, two artists whose work he and Hart regularly feature in their class. “The work Olivia did for Nike—that aesthetic evolved out of the inspiration she got from those photographers, artists who were using their everyday life as a diary.”

We recently caught up with Crawford to learn more about her experiences in Saturday High and her work with Nike.

Dotted Line: Which Saturday High classes did you take?
Olivia Crawford: I took an oil painting course my sophomore year of high school. We painted from models and that class really helped me with my later photography courses, Photography 1 with David Sotelo and Photography 2 with David and Evah Hart, which I took twice.

Dotted Line: What did you learn in those classes?
Crawford: Both emphasized making your own projects and learning to be sensitive to your environment. We came up with projects based on what we were seeing in our own photography and what we were reacting to in our environment.
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How Are You Spending Your Summer Vacation?

Photo by Amelia Stier

This summer, a group of Art Center students are immersing themselves in the culturally rich city of Berlin as part of Art Center’s cutting-edge take on traditional exchange programs called TestLabs.

In TestLabs, a group of students are selected representing a variety of disciplines, then placed in a metropolitan locale where they meet up with a corporate or nonprofit sponsor. The sponsor presents the students with a specific design challenge, which becomes their focus for the term. From there, the students form a pop-up studio, which becomes home base for ideation and instant visualization.

Through TestLab Berlin, Art Center students are spending the summer in the German city. The project includes a pop-up studio located at Bikini Berlin site, and is the start of a three-year partnership with GmbH.

In the current project, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, students are exploring ways to connect with Millennials using different areas of emphasis including music, fashion, sports, body modification and health and wellness.

Amelia Stier has set up a blog documenting the experience—be sure to follow along as the term progresses!

Photo by Amelia Stier