Category: Arts

This morning Murdza forwarded me an email containing some stuff from Barnes and Noble. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was about some exclusive line of back to school products Barnes and Noble is promoting with SCAD. Looks like SCAD is really expanding its reach and influence by trying out different things. This may have been done with other schools before, but it’s certainly a first with SCAD that I am aware of.

Come to think of it, this is actually an excellent idea especially for art schools since these designs are originated from students currently attending the college. It really helps to shed the image of “starving artist” and bring more attention to how SCAD actually tries pretty hard to get students to land on their feet in the commercial market with a running start (or I should say, harder than most art and design schools that I know of). Some background info about this partnership with Barnes and Noble from BN’s website:

This item is part of a unique product development partnership with student artists from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Working with SCAD’s Working Class Studio, Barnes & Noble has produced an exclusive “Back-to-Campus Collection” consisting of nine journals, two pencil pouches, a sketchbook, and a canvas messenger bag decorated with student-designed contemporary graphics.

Working Class Studio is a product development venture of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Each academic quarter, students are selected as interns to form an interdisciplinary design team led by studio directors. The studio manufactures a line of products based on the team’s market research and designs which are then sold nationwide. This innovative concept for an educational institution marries function and fine art to deliver a well-curated mix of cutting-edge design.

SCAD is obviously taking risk on producing and marketing students’ work using its own resources. But I think that’s really a non-risk because SCAD students work have been pretty consistently excellent. I just hope the students who worked on these projects got paid a lot more than the “work study” wages.

One of SCAD’s “competitors” in the mid-size art school category has been Academy of Art University. They areliterally all over the place like mushrooms after a spring rain. But one of the things that will make me absolutely advise AGAINST anyone to attend that school is its pathetic quality of commercials on TV.

At first I thought the piss-poorly produced ads were a local problem — you know, your typical variation of locally produced bad-taste TV commercials. But then when I saw a similar ad from AAU’s Las Vegas campus, I knew they did it to corner a specific segment of the art and design education market — the idiotic segment.

This begs the question though — how can an ART and DESIGN school be of any high quality when its commercials, the very representation about what the school is, are produced with such poor, anti-artistic and anti-design in quality? Sure, SCAD also welcomes anyone with pockets full of cash to attend it. But, for god’s sake, at least SCAD works for that cash — It prints high quality brochures, fliers and follow-up postcards. SCADtv is no high-budget production either, but there’s no half-assing when it comes to self-promotion and anything that has to do with cosmetically improving the image of the college. And that’s a lesson AAU should take to heart.

How can anyone serious about art and design go to that school having seen their commercials? Seriously.