Tag Archives: Students

Designmatters Fellow Spending Summer at UNICEF

Graduate Media Design student Dustin York has been awarded an Designmatters Fellowship for 2010. He is spending this term at UNICEF headquarters in New York.

York is spending the summer working in the groundbreaking Innovation Unit at UNICEF, working with students from NYU to develop new strategies around, and devise new visual and sensory experiences for, telling UNICEF’s global stories.

York’s keen ability for communication and media design, his seasoned professionalism and, in his own words, “interest for shaping experiences to communicate across great distances, and bringing new ideas to life” made him the ideal candidate for appointment as Designmatters Fellow.

Join us in wishing Dustin a wonderful and productive summer in New York!

Meet Andrew Kapamajian

Advertising student Andrew Kapamajian says that the incredible creativity of his classmates was one of the most surprising things about coming to Art Center.

“You come to Art Center thinking you have the most unique ideas, then you go to class and find at least three or four others there with the same idea,” he says. “It’s frustrating, but it pushes you to think harder.”

Read more about Andrew and his Art Center experience at in this great interview.

Meet Julia Tsao

Just what is Media Design?

Graduate Media Design student Julia Tsao defines it as “an opportunity space for designers to grapple with the existing elements in the world—whether those elements be tangible, intangible, digital, physical, cultural, social—and out of which create something new, exciting and sometimes confusing. It’s making the old feel new, and the new feel familiar, yet remarkable.”

Read more about Julia and her experiences studying Media Design at Art Center in this great interview.

What’s In A Name?

The New York Times has a fascinating profile on super-talented Illustration student Max Pauson, and his journey to Art Center.

“…This promising art student’s strong sense of self was hard-earned. It was forged in an unstable, emotionally wrenching childhood and, in an odd detail that might serve as a metaphor for his struggles, it comes after 19 years of life without a legal name. His birth certificate read only ‘(baby boy) Pauson.’ Name to come.”

Read more: What’s in a Name? A Lot, as It Turns Out

The Mystery of the Pimped Ad

Pimp My Ad poster

If you’ve walked through Art Center recently, chances are you’ve seen posters for Pimp My Ad.

The first poster that caught the Dotted Line’s attention was designed by second-term Advertising major Chris Gilbert and was a visual nod to William Bernbach’s classic 1959 Volkswagen ad campaign.

Printed on larger stock than most anything else adorning the College’s hallways, the poster featured a black-and-white photograph of, well, a “pimp hat,” paired with copy about a campus group whose existence was no longer a mystery.

Pimp My Ad, which borrows its name from MTV’s popular car customization show Pimp My Ride, is a weekly art direction workshop in which Advertising majors have their work critiqued informally by Advertising Department Acting Chair James Wojtowicz, guest speakers like Art Center Advertising alumnus Zhorab Gevorkian and, most importantly, their academic peers. Continue reading →

INSEAD Week at Art Center

For the past six years Art Center and INSEAD, a top-tier business school with campuses in Singapore and Fontainebleau, France, have participated in an annual study abroad program. Each year, a group of Art Center Product Design students travel to one of INSEAD’s two campuses to collaborate on a creative project with MBA candidates. They also attend graduate-level business courses in finance, marketing, entrepreneurship and various other business subjects.

Every March, INSEAD students and leadership visit Pasadena as part of INSEAD Week at Art Center. To help the visitors better understand the role of design and the design process, they are taken on a five-day tour of Southern California that includes workshops, presentations and visits to corporate studios. The latest batch of participants arrived in Pasadena Thursday, and will be here through Tuesday. They will tour Belkin, Stuart Karten Design, Idea!Lab, RTT and Disney Consumer Products, among many more fun activities. Be sure to welcome them to campus!

EcoCouncil Meets the President

Art Center President Lorne Buchman recently met with the EcoCouncil, a student-run organization which works closely with faculty and administration to find practical and creative solutions to reduce the College’s ecological impact. The group conducted a presentation for Buchman outlining their vision for sustainability initiatives at the College, including their desire for required courses in responsible design for all students, improved recycling efforts on campus during peak periods of the term, increasing accessibility to public transportation, and finding better ways to maintain and incorporate the Art Center community into our hillside environment.