The Art Center Tucson Campus Places 11th at the NSAC

The Art Center Design College Tucson campus placed eleventh in the nation in the American Advertising Federation (AAF) National Student Advertising Competition held in Washington D.C. last weekend.

Art Center students were among the elite colleges that advanced after winning their district competitions. This year’s corporate sponsor was the Century Council. Each college team developed an integrated $10 million marketing campaign with the objective of decreasing binge drinking among college students.

For months, students worked to develop a marketing and advertising plan that included creating online advertising, as well as print and television ads, collateral material, promotions, media selections, and appropriately allocating the budget.

The National Student Advertising Competition is the premiere college advertising competition. It provides more than 6,500 students “real-world” experience by requiring college students to design a strategic advertising/marketing/media campaign for one major, corporate sponsor. From over 140 colleges and universities, 18 schools were selected as finalists to present their campaigns to a panel of industry marketing and advertising executives at the AAF National Conference.

The Art Center Design College students and advisors participating in the AAF National Student Advertising Competition would also like to give special thanks to the AIGA AZ Chapter for their sponsorship and generous support of the team competing at the National Competition.

AAF Student Competition

It’s AAF Student Competition time again!

This year’s regional competition was held in Salt Lake City and both our campuses placed! The Tucson campus earned First Place and the Albuquerque campus earned Third Place. The Tucson campus team will now be going to Washington D.C. for the National competition. This marks the fifth out of six years an Art Center school has won the at the District level and gone to Nationals.

The following is our Official Press Release:

“Tucson, AZ – The Art Center Design College Tucson and Albuquerque campuses swept this year’s District 12 American Advertising Federation National Student Advertising Competition, placing first and third, respectively. The District 12 Competition was held in Salt Lake City, Utah, April 17-19, 2009.

Eight colleges competed for the opportunity to attend the American Advertising Federation national competition June 4-5 in Washington, DC. This is the sixth time The Art Center has won the district competition in five years and has advanced to nationals beating University of Texas – El Paso, University of Arizona, Brigham Young University, University of Northern Colorado, New Mexico State University, and the University of Utah.

The National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC) is the premiere college advertising competition. It provides more than 6500 students “real-world” experience by requiring college students to design a strategic advertising/marketing/media campaign for one major, corporate sponsor. From over 200 colleges and universities, sixteen schools are selected as finalists to present their campaigns to a panel of industry marketing and advertising executives at the AAF National Conference.

This year’s corporate sponsor is The Century Council, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting underage drinking and drunk driving. This year’s challenge was unique in that The Century Council asked college students around the country to create a campaign to decrease binge-drinking on college campuses.

Each college team developed an integrated $10 million marketing campaign targeting the 18-24-year-old youth market. For months, students worked to develop a marketing and advertising plan that included creating online advertising, as well as print and television ads, collateral material, promotions, new and traditional media selections, and appropriately allocating the budget.

The Tucson team members included presenters: Jessica Youde, Scott Mosteller, Jeff White, Cally Vick and Aaron Piatkowski. Other team members include: Derek Hoyle, Alessia Alaimo, Correne Hankins, Daniel Limon, Francis Neely, James Morley, Joel Cowdry, Lindsay Nortz, Marien Van Der Lelij, and Marisa Dominguez.

‘Real world experience is so important for today’s students. This experience has been both challenging and rewarding, as the students will be able to take what they have learned from this competition and apply the skills to their post college careers. The quality of the education students receive at The Art Center is evident in the success of our students at these types of competitions,’ said Sharmon Woods, President of The Art Center Design College.

Judges for this year’s event included
Erica Moulton, Director of Communications for The Century Council; is responsible for public relations, events, advertising and new media.

Sherri Anderson, Copywriter at Engauge in Columbus, Ohio; 13 years experience in crafting advertising messages, as well as teaching the subject at the Columbus College of Art & Design.

Kim Kemmer, Senior Planner for Prime Contact Research/Flint Communications; an industry veteran clients include brands such as Bobcat, AdFarm, BCBSND/WY, Alerus Financial and SMDC Healthcare.

Tom Sherer, Vice President and Executive Creative Director for Hydrogen, Seattle; as co-founder and award-winning designer clients include EBay, McAfee, Microsoft, Agilent Technologies, Kentworth Trucks and Quadrant Homes.

Tami Weitkunat, President and CEO of Mediacomp in Houston, TX, a media planning and buying service; is an expert in research, marketing and media planning for US markets as well as Canada and Puerto Rico.
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The Art Center Design College offers Bachelor of Arts degrees in Advertising and Marketing, Graphic Design, Interior Design, Illustration, Animation, Landscape Architecture and Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Studio Arts and Photography at two campus locations to over 650 students in Arizona and New Mexico.

Since 1983, The Art Center has been one of the leading providers of college art and design education. The Art Center is the only design college in the Southwest that has the same accreditation as major universities.”

News, Events and Announcements

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have made some major updates to our news, events and announcements web pages. We are going to be updating all these pages on a very frequent basis so you will have the most up to date information possible.

There is now current information on contests, events on campus, clubs, school news, and much more! For those of you that are not Art Center students, or faculty, check these pages out because you can get a good feel for what is going on here at The Art Center.

I hope you all get a lot of use from these pages! Click the link below to visit.

The Art Center- News and Events

-TACDC

PDF/X it.

Hi Everyone,

Today I am going to talk about the benefits of converting files to PDF/X for printing. We all know that we should include our fonts and images and make sure all of our links are good. We all know that we need to convert our images to CMYK and include appropriate bleeds. BUT…how many times have we forgotten to do one or more of these steps?

We all have had conversations with our printers about what we forgot to include in our files. This is exactly why we should be converting our files to PDF/X complient files. Even if we are not going to send our printer the PDF/X file, it is a good method of pre-flighting to ensure your files print well.

PDF/X files are pdfs that contain standards for high-end press printing. Before you can save the file, Acrobat, or Distiller checks your native file against these standards and any errors are brought to your attention. This way, if your file is missing a font, or a link, it will tell you and you can fix it. PDF/X 4 will actually convert RGB and LAB images to CMYK for you, should you forget to do this step while creating the artwork. Distiller also has many options for using PDF/X in its pre-flight options, which you can tailor to the specs of your printers.

Overall, PDF/X is a great tool to ensure that you have everything in order because it is fast and it will tell you all the issues with your file in one convenient place. This will give you the opportunity to fix any issues before you send it to print.

I hope this was helpful.

-TACDC

AIGA & Beautiful Losers

Hi Everyone,

The AIGA is sponsoring showings of the new film Beautiful Losers. You can read the synopsis from their website here, but basically, the movie takes a look at American sub-cultures and how they influenced art. If you like art, this is a movie you should see. Even if you aren’t into the sub-culture theme of the movie, it is interesting to see what they have to say about creating in general. It is almost more about creativity and creating than anything else.

For AIGA members, this is a great opportunity to get inspiration, mingle and network. The AIGA is showing events all over the country and you can get more information about showings near you by going to their website and searching for “beautiful losers”.

The Art Center Design College will be hosting one of these showings Oct. 4 in Tucson and you can visit the website for more information about the Tucson showing.

-TACDC

NSAC: New Focus For ‘09

The American Advertising Federation has sent out the preliminary information for the 2009 National Student Advertising Competition. This year the sponsor is the Century Council, an organization funded by major distillers with the purpose of fighting alcohol abuse and under-age binge drinking. With this new sponsor comes a new challenge for the competitors: public service advertising. This should be an interesting topic since the goal is no longer to sell a product, or brand, but to change behavior.

The goal of the marketing campaign is to use a $10 Million advertising and marketing budget to decrease binge drinking on college campuses. Each component must work as a cohesive campaign, as well as individually.

This new focus on public service gives a new purpose to the Competition. The participants are directly exposed to and effected by binge drinking, therefore, have insight into the importance of  helping to stop it. They will see how much power they have as marketers and advertisers in changing people’s behavior and the best part is that they will be helping solve a major issue that effects themselves and their peers.

Stay tuned to get updates on how the National Student Advertising Competition unfolds.

For more information follow these links:

American Advertising Federation
Century Council

-TACDC

New semester tips and tricks

Hi Everyone,

As a student of The Art Center Design College, I have been through quite a few semesters and I would like to offer some tips and tricks for getting through this upcoming semester.

1. Get Google Calendar! – Google offers a great calendar for you to keep track of all your assignments and other events going on in your life. It has many great features to help you stay organized.

2. Use your jump drive responsibly! – Jump drives are great for transporting information to and from computers, but are not great for long term storage. Always pull your files off the jump drive, work on them on the computer, and then save them back to your jump drive. This way you always have a backup file saved on a computer and you don’t have to completely rely on your unreliable jump drive.

3. Don’t save to the desktop! – New software is in place to delete the files on the desktop and other non-designated saving areas on the computer, every time the computer is restarted. If that’s not enough, saving to the desktop gives everyone access to your file, which can mean alterations and deleting of your files.

4. Student services! – Believe it or not, student services actually does care about you and they want you to get through the semester with as little trouble as possible. If you are “having issues”, make sure you talk to them because they really can help you.

5. Use Google Book Search and Google Scholar! – Use these free services offered by Google to find credible sources and information for all of your papers.

6. Prepare for the last two weeks! – Never fails…the last two weeks of the term are stressful and hard. Do whatever you can during the term to make your life easier in the last two weeks, it will pay off!

I hope this information helps you get through this semester unscathed!

-TACDC

FJORG!

Art Center graduate Sean Coleman recently competed in the FJORG! competition at SIGGRAPH 2008. For those of you who do not know what FJORG! is, it is an animation competition where the participants break into teams of 3 and have 32 hours to create an animated short based on a selected theme. Sean and his team placed 2nd in the contest. This is a great accomplishment since SIGGRAPH is a world renowned conference for visual arts.

Congratulations Sean!

Click the links below to find out more!

Sean’s second place animation!
SIGGRAPH
FJORG!
Sean Coleman – Animator

Summer Teen Camp Take 2

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday we finished our second week of our annual summer camp for high school students. The camp was a great success and the work was outstanding. The students participated in Interior Design, Graphic Design, Photography and Animation.

I personally worked with the graphic design students. Two of them participated in the first week and were able to build upon their knowledge. Each student did different work and some did multiple pieces. One of the girls did a poster for the new Batman movie and used Adobe Illustrator to make it all vector. She had never used this program, but learned it quickly and her design turned out great. Another girl did a digital illustration of a Cadillac. She drew the car, scanned in the image and painted it using only Adobe Photoshop. She was very unfamiliar with this program, but by the end of the camp she was very proficient using the selection and painting tools, and it showed! The other girl made a calendar with her favorite bands on it. She did 13 different designs using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign. Each design for the calendar was unique and she made solid layout and type decisions.

The teen camp experience was rewarding for everyone, especially the students. At the end of the last day they got to show their work and talk about it to everyone. I could tell they all had a great sense of accomplishment while they were showing their pieces to their family and friends, and faculty of the college. If these particular students wished to continue their knowledge in Graphic Design, I think they could all be very successful in the future.

-TACDC

Keynote…Presentation Perfection.

Hi Everyone,

Today I want to talk about Keynote. This is a program that comes with Macs as part of the iWork series. This is quickly becoming one of my favorite programs.

Keynote is as drag-and-drop as it gets. They have many design presets to choose from, which look great and are totally customizable. It has gorgeous transitions between slides and animations for slide content. It also has SmartBuilds, which are presets that allow you to display multiples of content on the same slide, which means you dont have to make a million slides for a simple photo gallery. The best thing about Keynote is its ease of use. You literally can pick a theme, drag and drop, copy and paste content, add transitions, and have an amazing looking and functioning presentation with absolutely no knowledge about design. Its almost like cheating!

Click this link to see Keynote in action.

The rest of the iWork series of programs are also worth looking into as well. The other two programs are Numbers and Pages. Numbers gives you pre-formatted, customizable spreadsheets for many different applications, plus blank spreadsheets for more savvy users. Pages has a ton of pre-formatted, pre-designed documents, such as, letters, envelopes, resumes, etc. This whole series can really make your life easier and its only $80 to activate them, or you can use the trial versions for 30 days…if you have a Mac.

I hope you got something from this post. I use all of the programs, almost on a daily basis and it truly keeps me organized and makes my life easier. Thanks Mr. Jobs!

-TACDC