🚀 go-pugleaf

"A friend of mine who attended Art Center at Pasadena told me of the hours and hours of late night work they did for just one class - making color chips, that is mixing colors in a gradated fashion. It sounded like a very challenging environment, and that, to me, would be good preparation for the real world of commercial work where the demands are high."

I could spend many hours relating similar experiences. Went there. Did that. Assignments like that do a couple of things. They instill a discipline that is hard to get anywhere else. They also help really hone your visual acuity even if you don't realize it at the time. The workload at Art Center when I was there, and it may have changed, was almost unbelievable, but it really did prep you for the most difficult real world situations.

More than just the hard work, it was the collaborative process that carried over after graduation. Working on joint projects with graphic designers emulating real world type assignments not only helped to introduce you to what designers needed from you, those classmates often became your clients in the real world. That early networking, if you chose to take advantage of it, was the real hidden value of a school like that. Even later today, I'm off to shoot another Manhattan Beach Wine Auction poster (at least the background anyway) with Andy Frank, the designer I met in fifth term and did a joint project on bicycles with. That was about 1984.

All the schools mentioned here are good. I'm partial to Art Center, partly because I went there, but also because of who taught there, it's proximity to a major market, and that there was such a broad scope of majors to interact with. Photography, film, fine art, automotive design, industrial design, environmental design, illustration and graphics and packaging were some of the types of students I hung out with. That kind of diversity got you out of what can sometimes be a "photographer's" mindset - seeing how an illustrator approaches a challenge vs how a photographer does.

One fact not in dispute is that Brooks' SB campus beats the hell out of spending a smoggy summer in Pasadena.