Tag Archives: Students

Ducha Halo Up for Award: Vote Today!

The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA)’s Open Minds video competition is now underway—and Art Center students Narbeh Dereghishian and Jessica Yeh need your vote!

The annual Open Minds contest features cutting-edge innovation by students from around the country.

This year, 15 teams have been selected to participate in the high-profile event, which involves an exhibition and video competition held in partnership with Inventors Digest.

Product Design student Dereghishian and Environmental Design student Yeh have been nominated for their Ducha Halo, a low-cost, portable shower designed in 2009’s Designmatters Safe Agua studio.

Check out their video, and vote for it, at the Inventors Digest site. Voting lasts through March 14. Winners will be announced March 26 at the Open Minds event, held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Good luck, Narbeh and Jessica!

Students Spend Presidents Day with the Presidents

ACSG President Erik Molano, left, and College president Lorne Buchman

Yesterday, Art Center Student Government (ACSG) hosted a “Meet the Presidents” event in the College’s cafeteria.

The event provided students an opportunity to hear directly from Art Center President Lorne Buchman and ACSG President Erik Molano on changes they could expect to see in the immediate future, and also offered them a sneak preview of Art Center’s new strategic plan, which will be presented to the College’s board of trustees later this week.

Over the next few days, we’ll provide highlights from the conversation.

Today: Lorne Buchman on changes at Art Center.

On funding scholarships and technology:

“Art Center delivers an education that is very expensive to deliver. It’s high in equipment, high in labor and there’s a lot of team teaching. The cost of educating each of you is actually greater than the tuition that is paid.

“A huge part of my job is to find the philanthropy and scholarships that are going to help with this, not only to cover the gap, but to be sensitive to the enormous financial commitment that you are making as students. I think about this all day. Sometimes I think about it all night.”

Continue reading →

Art Center Broadcast Cinema Students Win Big

Broadcast Cinema student Paul Linkogle has been selected to join the Blue Ribbon Panel for this year’s College Television Awards for his Johnson & Johnson spot seen below. Linkogle is also is a winner in the American Advertising Federation Los Angeles ADDY Awards competition.

Kevin Synder, another Broadcast Cinema student, has also won the American Advertising Federation Los Angeles ADDY Awards competition for his V8 spot:

Congrats, Paul and Kevin!

Meet the Presidents This President’s Day

This President’s Day, the Art Center Student Government (ACSG) is giving Art Center students the chance to speak with two Art Center presidents—College president Lorne Buchman and ACSG president Erik Molano.

The event will present a forum for students to ask questions and discuss various issues, in addition to learning more about the future of the College.

See you there, students!

ACSG Meet the Presidents
Monday, Feb. 21, 12:30-1:30 p.m.
Art Center Café
Hillside Campus

Happy Valentine’s Day from Art Center

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re featuring this lovely poster from the Designmatters Human Rights Exhibition studio. A partnership with the United Nations Department of Public Information, the studio challenged students to interpret and represent the Universal Declaration of Human Rights visually through a series of posters.

This poster, Everybody, was designed by Graphic Design student Christopher Kosek. (Kosek graduated in 2009.)

Everybody addresses Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Kosek writes:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. I wanted to talk about the realization that once you get past nationality, race, gender and the external human things, we are all the same inside.”

From November 2009 through March 2010, the Images for Human Rights: Student Voices exhibition were on view at the Skirball Cultural Center. The exhibition is now in the permanent installation at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Mich.

See the rest of the posters (in PDF form) and read more about this studio at the Designmatters site.

CSE Lantern Festival: Sleep and Happiness

At Art Center’s annual Chinese Lantern Festival held today, the most common wishes penned on bright orange and red lanterns were for sleep and happiness.

Photo by Adam Lopez

Not necessarily at the same time–but one can certainly see a connection when realizing they were written by art and design students.

About 75 students, faculty and staff entrusted their wants, whims and yearnings to the promise of the lantern at today’s event, held by Art Center’s Center for the Student Experience (CSE).

Next week, all lanterns created today will hang along both sides of the Bridge for all to enjoy.

A sample of some of the other wishes:

“To see beyond them all”
“I will travel to nearby places and imagine they are far”
“To see her again”
“Peace inside”
“More inspiration”

Lunar New Year celebrations traditionally end with a lantern festival, during which colorful lanterns are lit and released into the air. This year the event lands on Thursday, February 17, to correspond with the full moon. In many Asian countries, releasing the lanterns is believed to bring good fortune and prosperity. People write their wishes on paper lanterns before releasing them in hopes that they will be granted.

Here’s to plenty of sleep and happiness to all of our students!

Photo by Adam Lopez

Changing the World, One Project at a Time

A Designmatters transdisciplinary studio with a San Diego-based international health and humanitarian aid organization has resulted in a beautiful promotional film created by Art Center students.

The studio, held last summer, focused on rebranding Project Concern International (PCI) for their 50^th anniversary.

In August, three Photography and Film students traveled to Zambia with PCI to observe and document their work in the field.

“My goal for the film from the start was to document the people in Zambia, and to show the world what their lives are like,” said Film student John X. Carey, director of the piece.

“It was a difficult first film for me to make, but such an incredible experience.”

In other PCI news, this week the organization launched a new identity stemming from the student work in last summer’s studio.

“There is a different level of engagement when you are working with design students—their enthusiasm and energy are palpable,” PCI’s Shawn Ruggeiro said about the studio. “Their perspective on this project, as well as our organization, was refreshing and inspiring.”

View the piece below, and read more about the Designmatters/PCI 50^th Anniversary Project.

West Coast Bright Design Challenge Brings Scholarships to Art Center

In December, five Art Center students were awarded generous scholarships through the inaugural West Coast Bright Design Challenge.

Sponsored by the National Association for Surface Finishing (NASF), the West Coast competition was co-sponsored by the Metal Finishing Association of Southern California (MFASC).

The West Coast Bright Design Challenge was incorporated into last term’s Material Explorations class, led by Art Center instructors Catherine McLean and Krystina Castella. A transdisciplinary team made up of Product Design, Environmental Design, Fine Art and Graduate Industrial Design students spent the term learning about surface finishing technologies and applications, and worked with local electroplating companies to enhance their understanding of the process. Students were challenged to create innovative works utilizing these technologies.

At the end of the class, students presented finished 3-D prototypes and presentations to a panel of faculty and MFASC judges. The students with the top three concepts as judged by the panel were each awarded $5,000 scholarships, and two additional students received honorable mentions and $2,500 scholarships.

Scholarship Winners:

Viirj Kan, Environmental Design: $5,000 Prize
Carlos Vides, Environmental Design: $5,000 Prize
Ed Schofield, Graphic Design: $5,000 Prize
Byron Wilson, Product Design: $2,500 Prize
Ji Hyun Lee, Product Design: $2,500 Prize

Art Center and the MFASC were thrilled with the collaboration and plan to continue the West Coast Bright Design Challenge in 2011. Congratulations to the student winners!

(Pictured, from left to right: Edward Schofield, $5,000 scholarship award recipient; Virginia Kan, $5,000 scholarship award recipient; Bryan Leiker, K&L Anodizing; Carlos Vides, $5,000 scholarship award recipient; Dan Cunningham, MFASC executive director; Alan Olick, MFASC president and president, General Plating Co.; Byron Wilson, $2,500 scholarship award recipient; Ji Hyun Lee, $2,500 scholarship award recipient; Gregg Halligan, former MFASC president.)

Next Big Thing: The Lumi Process

Brand X wrote a great cover story this week on Art Center Product Design students Jesse Genet and Stéphan Angoulvant and their studio Lumi Co. The pair created a new form of printing onto materials, which they call the Lumi Process.

The cutting-edge technology allows the printing of vivid, photo-like images onto natural materials such as denim, wood and leather without the use of chemicals—something never before done in the world of design.

From the article: “Lumi Co.’s first products — a supple leather wallet printed with an image of the Brewery’s neighboring warehouses and a laptop bag featuring a 1960s Richard Avedon print — might not appear to be anything innovative. After all, photography and design have a history of playing off each other. But what makes their technique unique is that the image is ingrained in the fiber, meaning materials like pleather do not have to be used to display a print.”

Also interesting: Lumi Co got its start last year with funds raised on Kickstarter. Genet explains the process in the video below.

A Rising (Sixth Magnitude) Star

Open issue 49 of CMYK Magazine (due on newsstands this month) and you’ll find the work of recent John Marshall High School graduate and Saturday High student Richard Kam.

A logo and poster Richard created for the nonprofit The World at Night was selected for inclusion in the magazine by Connie Hwang of San Francisco’s Connie Hwang Design. The logo and poster were part of a rebranding assignment in Zohrab “Z” Gevorkian’s Graphic Design Saturday High course last spring. Gevorkian was so impressed by Richard’s work that he encouraged him to submit his work to CMYK, a magazine that features work by emerging college art students.

The World at Night, poster by Kam

“I felt Richard’s work was at a place that was deserving to be competitive,” explains Gevorkian. “Yes, he was a high school student, but it is a college course. He was hesitant at first, but Richard ended up submitting his work, and he was selected. He really broke the mold.”

We recently caught up with Kam to chat about the honor.

Dotted Line: Tell us a little about the work that CMYK selected.
Richard Kam: They’re printing a logo and a poster I designed for The World a Night (TWAN), an offshoot of Astronomers Without Borders. TWAN is a photography group whose slogan is “One people, one sky,” and its members, who come from all around the world, upload and share beautiful nighttime and space photography. They also organize an annual exhibition. Their basic philosophy is that regardless of which country you’re from, the night sky is for all of us to share.

Dotted Line: Why did you choose TWAN?
Kam: I really like astronomy and space exploration. It’s a whole new frontier and it’s so vast. And I really like what TWAN is doing, so I wanted to bring some new light to them.

Dotted Line: Is TWAN aware of your redesign?
Kam: A few weeks before CMYK contacted me, I gathered together all my files, and I wrote TWAN a really long email. I started with, “If you’re really busy right now, please don’t read this. Open it at a later time. And please forward this to somebody who’s in a position to read this.” The rest of the letter was the creative brief I wrote for the project in class. I ended by asking them to just look at a fan’s work and see what they think.