Tag Archives: Students

Art Center Racks Up Art Directors Club Awards

More great award news—the 2011-2012 Art Center Viewbook has won a Silver Award in the Art Directors Club 90th Annual Awards competition in the Professional Book Design category.

Judged by an international panel of the world’s most respected creative professionals, the ADC Annual Awards competition honors the best design from around the world in interactive media, broadcast and print advertising, graphic design, publication design, packaging, photography and illustration. The Viewbook will be included in the Art Directors Annual, the oldest and most respected compendium of outstanding work in the industry. The Viewbook will be on display at the awards presentation in New York and will then be included in the Art Director’s Club exhibitions that travel throughout North America, Europe, Asia and South America.

But the Viewbook wasn’t the only winner—the Safe Agua Chile book produced by Designmatters won a Merit Award in the Student Book Design and Student Motion categories, and the Cymatics exhibition garnered a Bronze Award in the Student Branding category. The Fly Title Sequence won a gold in the Student Motion category.

Congratulations to all for these well-deserved honors!

Grad Show Preview in Pictures

It’s pretty quiet on campus here today after a whirlwind few weeks leading up to the end of Spring Term and Saturday’s Graduation.

Enjoy this slideshow of images from Thursday night’s Grad Show Preview, featuring work of graduating students:

MDP Students Create Installation for A+D Museum

The following post, written by faculty member Phil van Allen, is reprinted from his blog.

View Slideshow

Recently a few of my students from the Media Design Program at Art Center and I created an interactive video installation for the 10th anniversary of the Architecture+Design Museum.

The A+D is a growing institution in the Los Angeles area, and they were having a party for their board and major donors. Two weeks before the event I got a call from museum supporter Garson Yu owner of yU+co, asking to help out in a volunteer effort to create something to show the history of the museum. By the time I got some students to sign up, and an approach approved, we had just one week to make the entire project.

The project consists of six plywood panels mounted to the wall, with separate slideshows running on each panel. Because the panels are different distances from the wall, there’s a dimensional effect created.

The idea was to break the normal flat rectangle of projection and create an installation that felt more like a physical part of the space. In addition to the randomly playing slideshows on each panel, we created a simple interactive feature so if someone walked up to the wall, a flourish of motion graphics would appear unifying all the panels, then fading into a photo of the front of the museum spread across several panels.

The project was a collaborative design and build between myself and three students: Brooklyn Brown, Manny Darden and Rubina Ramchandani. The design approach was partially inspired by some of Manny’s thesis work.

For software, we used my NETLab Toolkit with a new SlideShow widget I developed that runs each of the slideshows - the entire project has no ActionScript, using only the toolkit widgets. Images were placed in folders, and each SlideShow widget played a set of images from these folders in a random order. Two projectors were used to get a wider display (2500 pixels), and these were fed by a video splitter out of a MacBook Pro (this way the Flash movie played across both projectors). An Infrared proximity sensor was used to detect someone in front of the wall, and this started the playback of five different video streams across the different panels.

View videos of the project on van Allen’s site.

Art Center Grads Participating in Jeunes Talents

Two recent alums from Art Center’s Photography and Imaging Department, Christie Hemm and Maeghan Henry, are among eight artists who recently completed the fifth annual Jeunes Talents photography program. This cultural tourism initiative combines tourism and the arts, photography and real-life experience, travel and inspiration, and American and French sensibilities to show life in France today.

Neither Hemm nor Henry had been to France before the program. Watch the videos below to hear their thoughts on their upcoming adventures:

Be sure to follow along with Christie, Magehan and the other artists at Jeunes Talents.

Student Work on Display at Milan Furniture Show

Brooke Woosley at work in her booth at the Salone Satellite

The New York Times has a great article on last week’s International Furniture Fair in Milan, where several Art Center students and alumni were exhibiting their work.

For up-and-coming designers, “Milan is something else: a gateway to an international reputation, the place where a prototype might be snapped up for production, or a chat at Bar Basso (the watering hole that is to ambitious designers what Les Deux Magots was to expatriate writers in Paris) might lead to a job in a renowned studio. Mixing with the throngs of manufacturers, distributors and buyers are legions of young designers who aspire to global recognition and the important money that goes with it.”

The article highlights alumna Brooke Woosley, who was at the fair exhibiting two designs: Chloros, a faceted display case and Bundle, a dangling lamp.

From the article:

By noon on the fair’s opening day, Ms. Woosley had already begun to regret her brown leather boots with their cruel wooden soles. In 2007, she had helped design the booth at the Satellite occupied by her classmates at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. This was her second trip to the fair. Had she forgotten that sensible shoes, even in this capital of style, aren’t a fashion crime, but preventative therapy? And speaking of discomfort, what was she planning to do if someone ordered, say, 100 Chloros?

View student designs on display at the fair, and check out additional coverage on the fair and Art Center students exhibiting designs there:

Students Examine Graying of AIDS

Scientific advances in recent decades have meant that HIV and AIDS are no longer a death sentence. People with AIDS are living longer today than ever before, and by 2015 half the people in the U.S. with HIV or AIDS will be 50 or older.

© 2011 Art Center College of Design/Dlugolecki Photography (“The Greying of AIDS Exhibition”)

A current Illustration Department/Designmatters student project is underway examining the graying of AIDS. It is being conducted as a corollary to the current Williamson exhibition, Graphic Intervention, and is on display through Sunday.

The Pasadena Weekly has a wonderful article today on the topic. Carl Kozlowski writes:

In an attempt to educate the public about this increasingly important issue for the nation’s senior community, Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design presents “The Graying of AIDS Exhibition: Off the Wall,” part of the larger “Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness Posters” exhibit at the college’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery through Sunday.

“Our project tries to address ageism and living with HIV/AIDS among older adults,” says Brian Rea, an instructor with the Art Center’s illustration department who teaches the school’s Off the Wall installation-art course. “Often they’re seen as statistics, so the students really took it upon themselves to address that, and take the most powerful things being said and make them the most accessible for those who might view the piece.”

Rea first learned of the project after being approached by Art Center’s Educational Department, which aligns students and faculty with outside organizations to produce art and design that can affect social change. Rea’s Off the Wall course, housed in the Illustration Department, teaches experimental image-making and installation work as they apply to illustration and design.

Read more: The Graying of AIDS: Art Center exhibit focuses on America’s largest group of people living with HIV/AIDS

It’s Here: Week 14

© Steven A. Heller/Art Center College of Design

Art Center, we’re already halfway through Week 14, and you know what that means—tons of events culminating in Graduation on Saturday.

Rest up and prepare for:

  • Wednesday, April 20, 6-10 pm: 4 Hours Solid (South Campus)
  • Wednesday, April 20, 7-9 pm: Experience Art Center at Night (South Campus)
  • Thursday, April  21, 6 pm: Graduation Show Preview and Alumni Reception (invitation only)
  • Saturday, April 23, 2:30 pm: Faculty Reception (faculty, special guests and College leadership)
  • Saturday, April 23, 4 pm: Spring Term Graduation (Hillside Campus, and webcast live)
  • Saturday, April 23, 4-10 pm: MFA Open Studios (South Campus)
  • Saturday, April 23, 6 pm: Graduation Show (Hillside Campus)

It’s a jam-packed few days. But don’t worry—there’s still time to sneak in a nap before the fun begins!

4 Hours Solid: April 20


Art Center’s newest tradition is back for its second year. Join us for 4 Hours Solid, an annual showcase of work and ideas from Art Center’s graduate programs in Art, Broadcast Cinema, Industrial Design and Media Design. Enjoy four jam-packed hours of exhibitions, screenings, installations, presentations, food trucks and more. The event will be held at South Campus. You won’t want to miss it!

4 Hours Solid
Wednesday, April 20, 6-10 p.m.
South Campus

Meet Meliné Khatchatourian

Meliné Khatchatourian didn’t always know she was going to enter the arena of transportation design.

Khatchatourian

In fact, she never even took a fine art course until her senior year as a communications major at the University of California, San Diego.

“I was surprised to discover that I not only enjoyed those [art] classes, but I excelled in them,” Khatchatourian says. “I knew that I had discovered a path I had to pursue.”

She soon enrolled in Introduction to Product and Transportation Design at Art Center at Night (ACN). Khatchatourian vividly recalls the first day her class focused on transportation studies when her instructor used her car as a teaching tool. “My car was dissected and explained as a work of functional art,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘I need to learn as much about this discipline as I can.’”

So Khatchatourian met with ACN Director Dana Walker, who suggested courses to prepare her portfolio for the College’s Transportation Design program. And the rest is ACN history.

Read her full story.

Ready to make history yourself? Then come to Experience Art Center at Night, April 18 through 20, 7to 9 p.m., a three-evening event where you can explore ACN’s broad range of courses.

Registration for ACN’s Summer Term is now open; courses begin May 16.