Campus News |
ART CENTER NEWSWIRE - March 20, 2000
PASADENA, CA, USA | To keep abreast of the exciting and innovative ideas, people and projects at Art Center College of Design, the media and general public can subscribe to Art Center's news digest by sending a blank email to: newswire-on@lists.artcenter.edu. We highlight some of the newsmakers in our Art Center community on the first and third Monday every month. To report news or obtain more information, contact Jan Kingaard, tel. 626-396-2394, fax 626-683-9233.
GREAT MINDS
Digital Designers@work Lecture Series
Kent Campbell spoke about web design, convergent media and his experience launching, nurturing and eventually selling his successful technology-based design company, evit_caretni, to one of the world's leading web design companies, Rare Medium.
Toyota Motor Corporation Endowed Lecture ProgramStefan Sagmeister, a native of Austria, earned an M.F.A. in graphic design from the School for Applied Arts in Vienna and subsequently attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn as a Fulbright scholar, receiving an M.S. in communication design. Following stints at M&Co. in New York and in the Hong Kong office of the Leo Burnett ad agency, he founded the New York-based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993. Specializing in design for the music industry, he has created graphics and packaging for the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, Aerosmith, and Pat Matheny. His work has been nominated for Grammy awards four times, and he has won most of the major international design awards, including honors from the New York Art Directors Club, the One Show, and the Grand Prix in Moscow. Sagmeister shared examples of his work and discussed his approach to design.
Lunar Design co-founder Gerard Furbershaw was the special guest of the Design Management class. He has over 20 years of design experience and oversees all business operations and is the driving force behind Lunar's emerging venture design effort. "Starting A Design Business" looked into how he helped build an internationally respected, award-winning product design firm.
ADVERTISING
HOW International Design Competition
Fermin Guerrero received a Student Merit Award for his stand-out design from over 4,000 entries from firms and designers around the globe.ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN
Wall Street Journal
Art Center's Patricia Belton Oliver, chairwoman of the environmental design department, hopes that the Gwen Bolden Manor project will create a new network between manufacturers and designers and ultimately an appreciation that design must go hand in hand with manufacturing. The pilot nonprofit program linked her design students with wood-working students from Cerritos College to furnish five apartments at a complex built by Concerned Citizens of South-Central L.A. The next educational phase of the pilot program is to create an entrepreneurial component to get students to set up their own furniture companies. Last year, the number of furniture-making workers in L.A. County climbed to around 28,000 due to the strong economy and the creativity of Southern California's furniture designers.GRAPHIC DESIGN
HOW International Design Competition
Gary A. Williams II won two Student Merit awards for his stand-out design from over 4,000 entries from firms and designers around the globe.
Communication ArtsAs you enter the office of Mauk Design, you sense that you are in the workspace of no ordinary design firm. Now in its thirteenth year, this San Francisco, California-based firm has built a reputation through innovative exhibit design for technology-oriented companies such as Apple Computer, Intel and Sony Electronics. Mauk Design garners awards from the major exhibition, industrial and graphic design competitions, and has attracted an increasingly diverse list of clients including Levi Strauss & Co. and Volkswagen of America. The key to this success, according to founder and principal Mitchell Mauk, is the ability to express a client's identity in the three-dimensional realm, what the Art Center graduate refers to as "total brand integration."
Communication ArtsMaria Piscopo is a creative services consultant based in Southern California. She teaches the "Managing Creative Services" class for Dynamic Graphics Educational Foundation and "Selling Yourself (& Your Work)" class at Art Center. She is on the Advisory Council of California State University at Long Beach Art and Humanities Department and teaches classes for their extension program. Piscopo is the author of four videos and three books. She is a frequent contributor to CA's Freelance column.
ILLUSTRATION
Los Angeles Times Magazine
Alumna Esther Pearl Watson illustrated TV writer Robert Rabinowitz's article, "It's Just a Date."
Daily BreezeWhat's the key to writing a successful children's book? "Perseverance," according to Lori Wangsness Mitchell. The Art Center graduate's first children's book, Different Just Like Me, addresses the subject of tolerance for diversity in a simple and effective way. Mitchell illustrated her own book with whimsical, Eloise-style color drawings.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Houston Forward Times
Alumnus Bob Heliton's photos have been published in TIME magazine as well as numerous national and local publications, magazines and journals. He recently exhibited 40 of his pieces at The Gallery at the Art Institute of Houston.PRODUCT DESIGN
Product Design & Development
Can you imagine a more exciting time to be a product designer than now, at the threshold of a bold new millennium? The promise of emerging tools and technologies is great. But so are the demands as designers strive to keep complex products simple and easy to use. Technical Editor Gil Bassak asked members of the faculty at Art Center where design is heading and illustrated their points with student work. The Internet, ease of use, virtual reality, rapid modeling, personalized objects, "smart" design, and health monitoring / diagnostic / treatment products were among the ideas presented by product, environmental, new media, technical skills, and transportation instructors.TRANSPORTATION DESIGN
Auto India
Swedish carmaker Volvo, with its image of being the safest affordable car, had Art Center students design several concept cars for the company with stunning results. One of the reasons the designs were so successful is that the students come from different backgrounds, both from the US and abroad. This rich multi-ethnic brew of talent, seasoned by the heady Californian climate and talented professors, eventually bubbles over into a variety of creative ideas and artistic products such as paintings, sculptures, graphic and product designs and, of course, car models.
Sacramento BeeFast-rising designer Freeman Thomas spent nearly two decades designing quintessentially European cars for Porsche, Volkswagen and Audi. He had a major hand in creating the retro new Beetle and designed the stylish Audi TT coupe. But last year he returned to make his mark in his native country as head of the California design studios for DaimlerChrysler Corp. "One of my dreams is to design the definitive American car," said the Art Center alumnus.
Automotive NewsShiro Nakamura startled many in the Japanese auto industry in October when he left his post as head of design at Isuzu Motors Ltd. for the top design slot at Nissan Motor Co. Nakamura's recent designs at Isuzu included the Kai and ZXS show vehicles. Nissan's COO Carlos Ghosn and product czar Patrick Pelata told him design would be a very high priority in the company. The new design chief is thinking along the lines of "form follows emotion" to satisfy the senses as well as function. The Art Center graduate's responsibility is to keep the design studios active by giving design direction and expects to start showing more concepts and having more variety. He wants Nissan design to be more global, and be a more multicultural organization.
Los Angeles TimesEnding months of speculation, Ford Motor Co. has moved the U.S. headquarters of its foreign and domestic luxury lines to Irvine, cementing Southern California's reputation as a key automotive industry center. The relocation from New Jersey of Aston Martin, Jaguar and Volvo to join Lincoln in Ford's Premier Automotive Group is expected to attract a plethora of advertising agencies, design studios and other businesses that support the car industry. GM and Ford are two of about 20 automotive design studios in the region, all of them fed by Art Center.
WILLIAMSON GALLERY
San Marino Tribune & San Marino News
Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel described the work of Jennifer Steinkamp as "pushing painting into the fourth dimension." In her large-scale light and sound installations, Steinkamp uses computer-generated imagery to blur the boundaries between real and virtual space. The artist has shown her work nationally and has recently completed a permanent installation at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. She has also had solo exhibitions at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Grengrassi Gallery, London, ADMF in Santa Monica, The Exchange in New York and the Institute of Visual Arts, Wisconsin. "Stiffs," her current installation at Art Center was developed with sound engineer Jimmy Johnson.