This term, I’m taking Introduction to Graphic Design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Caltech has a partnership with them where Caltech will pay the class fees for us, and we are able to sign up for the Art Center at Night (ACN) courses. We do have to pay for the materials ourselves though, such as foamboards, x-acto knives, portfolio folders, etc..

It’s very exciting to be able to pursue art here at the Art Center; Caltech does offer a few art courses such as painting and ceramics, but not many. One thing to keep in mind is that the Art Center runs on a semester schedule, so for example, my Graphic Design course is running from January 22 to April 16, while Caltech’s winter term ends on March 16.

The people taking ACN courses come from varied backgrounds — some are working professionals, some are college students not from Art Center like me, and some are from the Art Center day degree program. My classmates are fairly young — I would say that the oldest person is in his late 20’s.

On the first day, we talked about different types and usages of graphic design. In the poster in the upper right of the board in the photo below, there are some different letters. You might recognize some of these from different logos! For example, the C is from the Chicago Cubs. We talked about this common recognition and association with different letters — termed ‘visual stable data’.

We were also introduced to our next project, a typography project! The goal is to find hidden letters in our everyday world, correspond those letters to actual fonts, and form a four letter word with them. I’ll talk about it more in a following post, once I’ve completed the project 🙂