CalArts Art Student Interview: Meet Ania Diakoff.

A great video interview with Ania Diakoff, a graphic design grad student in her last year at CalArts. This video shows the community and atmosphere of the program, it gives you an accurate feel of the type of education we’re getting here. She emphasizes the community between the undergraduate and graduate students, something that is very important to me and at the root of FISK. Below is a quote that I agree strongly with.

It’s not for people with low standards of working, it’s a kind of 24 hour working environment. – Ania Diakoff

Peter Kaplan is a designer and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is a designer in the Student Affairs department at California Institute of the Arts where he handles printed collateral for the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (Redcat). Peter also teaches typography and publication design at CalArts.

Could you start off by telling us what you were doing before CalArts and how you got into graphic design?

Yes I can, I studied graphic design for my undergrad at the University of Delaware and worked as a designer in NY for about seven years following school. That was when I applied to CalArts.

You worked in New York for a short time after graduation, was it hard to leave? What do you like/dislike about New York compared to Los Angeles?

Leaving California so soon after school was both good and bad. The bad was the abrupt end to my school experience… suddenly much of what I knew was gone. It was a shock. However this was equally good as it gave me the opportunity to learn who I was post-school free from the school environment. Does that make sense?

What did the CalArts graduate program do for you?

I’m hopeful that the answer to the question will be constantly evolving. For now I’ll say it was an experience I was glad to have.

What is it about CalArts that made you want to come back after graduation?

Actually, I did not intend to come back to CalArts to teach or to work, but I’m happy things worked out as they did. I moved back to LA to teach at Otis and was offered the job at CalArts after I had returned.

How is it having the role reversed? You’re now apart of the wonderful faculty that was once teaching you.

Honestly, there is much about CalArts that is pretty great and it’s exciting to be able to participate in it as a faculty member. Having said that, being a teacher at a place where I was a student can be strange.

What kind of qualities make for a good design teacher?

From a student point of view, I enjoyed any teacher who was invested in what I was doing and yet was never fully pleased by the results.

You work in the public affairs office which designs REDCAT collateral, how is it working there?

I like working there, it’s a pretty good job. Nice people and decent work.

What big projects are you working on now?

Every year I do two REDCAT season brochures and related promotion collateral. Those are the major projects I work on.

With working and teaching, how much time do you have for personal work?

I feel like I don’t have as much time for personal work as I would want, but I think this is a lie I tell myself. I seem to find plenty of time to watch TV or google random crap.

Do you have any advice for students who are near graduation?

Clearly these seem to be tricky times, but I kind of believe it all works out. Does that help?

Can you give a motivational quote for all of us hard-working, tired and starving design students?

Actually no, I can’t.
If I’m being honest, school is hard and stressful. That’s how the experience works. Having said that, it’s probably not as important as it seems at the time. I don’t know. This is a hard question.

With all of the design blogs out there, for us and students all over what would you like to see with FISK?

What would like to see in FISK? Are you having fun with it? That I what I want to see. Just make something interesting with it. Thanks!

Do you wear patterned/designed socks, plain socks or no socks?
Lately I’ve been wearing black socks, but I do have a few striped pair that I feel good about.

Thanks Peter for the interview!

Jason Munn is originally from Wisconsin but now calls Oakland, California home. Arising from a love of independent music, design, and making for the sake of making, his posters soon became a fixture in the local independent music scene.

He started The Small Stakes in the fall of 2003, and it has since unfolded into a successful independent design studio, producing nationally and internationally commissioned work in a range of print materials, including book covers, album packaging, T-shirt designs, screen-printed posters, and illustrations.

Jason’s work has appeared in Print, Communication Arts, Step Inside Design, Computer Arts Projects, Étapes, ReadyMade, and Creative Review. His work has also been featured in numerous exhibits and is part of the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Read the interview after the break.

Q: You got into design because of your passion for music and now you’re making a living off of designing posters for your favorite musicians. How do you feel about designers doing work that they have no interest in?

A: Growing up I was really involved in music and skateboarding and the aesthetics that went along with both. After eventually discovering that it was possible to get hired to do that kind of work I started taking design classes and a lot of my projects revolved around my interest in both music and skateboarding. After finishing school I worked in a few different design studios and design departments of larger companies, which were really beneficial to me even though the subject matter wasn’t always of huge interest to me. When I would go home I could take what I’ve learned during the day and apply it to some of the work I was doing outside of the studio work – typically work for friends in bands.

At CalArts, students collaborate on posters quite frequently for events and visiting lecturers. Have you ever collaborated with someone on a poster or project? If not, would you?

I haven’t worked on too many collaborative projects, but this summer I plan to work on a project with Dirk Fowler, a good friend of mine and one of my favorite designers as well.

What designers influence your work? Past and present.

I really enjoy the work of Alan Fletcher, his general approach to problem solving and design. Barney Bubbles and Peter Saville as well for different reasons. Most of my favorite designers now include Jeff Kleinsmith, Aesthetic Apparatus, Sonnenzimmer, and Dirk Fowler.

Links: Website

A jumbled selection of books that during my education as a graphic designer have been influential, informative, inspirational, or just intriguing, and perhaps interesting to the next generation of graphic designers… Some of these publications can be found and purchased cheaply at bookfinder.com, especially the paperbacks. I’ve written short articles for Eye magazine about the Paulo Soleri book, Compendium for Literates and Right On!

I Seem To Be A Verb by Buckminster Fuller, designed by Quentin Fiore, 1970

Bits World by Graphic Thought Facility/Emily King, designed by GTF, 2001

Blueprint for Counter Education by Maurice Stein & Larry Miller, designed by Marshall Henrichs, 1970

Visionary Cities: The Arcology of Paolo Soleri, designed by Donald Wall, 1971

Bruno Munari, Air Made Visible by Claude Lichtenstein and Alfredo W. Haberli, designed by Atelier Lars Muller, 2000

Printed Matter by Karel Martens, designed by Karel Martens, 1996

Thames and Hudson Manual of Television Graphics by Ron Hurrell, designer Unknown 1973

Graphic Designers in the USA / 3, designed by Gan Hosoya, 1972

Typographica Number 7, ed. By Herbert Spencer, designed by Herbert Spencer, 1963

The Colophon, each signature designed by a different press, 1931

Modern Typography by Robin Kinross, designed by Robin Kinross, 1992

Best Book Designs 1993, designed by Thomas Widdershoven, 1994

Right On! By Maryl Levine and John Naisbitt, designed by David L. Burke, 1970

Sandberg, A Documentary by Ad Petersen and Pieter Brattinga, designed by Brattinga and Petersen , 1975

Alphabet and Image Number 6, designer Unknown , 1948

Tradedmarks by Peter Wildbur, designer Unknown (possibly Wildbur), 1966

Compendium For Literates by Karl Gerstner, designed by Karl Gerstner, 1974

I chose these images because they represent my interests in work that calls into question conventions of beauty. Of course those conventions are always under scrutiny and the definition is difficult to “fix,” but M/M Paris (Mathias Augustyniak, Michaël Amzalag, mmparis.com); Cyan (Daniela Haufe, Detlef Fiedler, cyan.de); (Richard) Niessen & (Esther) de Vries, niessendevries. nl; Tomato (Steve Baker, Dirk van Dooren, Karl Hyde, Richard Smith, Simon Taylor, John Warwicker, Graham Wood, Jason Kedgley, Michael Horsham, www.tomato.co.uk) and Vier5 (Marco Fiedler, Achim Reichert, vier5.de) deal with conventions as a central component of their practice. The resulting work is not so much a conscious effort to “deliver the goods” per se, but an effort to tackle the bigger issues of how to present their [respective] conception of form in a way that responses to contemporary culture.

Robert Rauschenberg: Booster, 1967. April Greiman: Design Quarterly 133, 1987.

M/M Paris: Daria I Love You (Björk), 2008.

Cyan: Singuhr–Hoergalerie Music Festival, 2008.

Cyan: Singuhr–Hoergalerie Music Festival, 2004.

Cyan: 21st Poster Biennial Warsaw, 2008.

Cyan: 25 Years of Good Friends Music, 2008.

Cyan: “Progressive Posters” for 89, 2009.

Cyan: British Council, Program brochures, 2000–2004.

Cyan: Singuhr-Hoergalerie 1996–1998 catalog, 1999.

Founded in 1992, Cyan’s practice focusses on providing for the
needs of the cultural sector and public institutions.


Niessen & de Vries: Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF), 2007.

Niessen & de Vries: Forum Typographie lecture, 2008.

The letters of the sentence “Donne au train des idées d’avance”
(“Ideas move forward on a train”) are cropped as if it were a
panorama seen through the window of a moving train.

This poster was made for the lecture Niessen & de Vries gave at
the Hochschule für Künsten Bremen about the design school
Ulm.

Tomato: Six Words, 2006.

Tomato: Idea Magazine 337, 2009.

In 2006, Wired Magazine asked 33 writers and 5 designers to
conceive of science fiction stories using a limit of 6-words. The
poster by Tomato displays 5 of those stories.

Idea Magazine 337 featured a 144-page essay on a number of
books Tomato has published including The Floating World,
Process, Tomato and visual works for Underworld.

Vier5: Centre of Contemporary Art in Bretigny, Void2, 2005 .

Vier5: Centre of Contemporary Art in Bretigny, XEvent, 2006.

Vier5: Centre of Contemporary Art in Bretigny, La Monnaie Vivante, 2006.

Vier5 conceived of and continue to design the identity and exhibition materials for the Centre of Contemporary Art in Bretigny.

“All my life I’ve kept scrapbooks, collected printed material, books, posters, pages, cards, bits and pieces…always with the intention of getting back to it someday. Frequently I do, but the material keeps piling up, way beyond anything I’ll ever need or use…here’s an opportunity to do something with some of it: post it and pass it on.” -Ed Fella

A detail from a 1930 Norman Rockwell illustration: A determined art student…could be Miss Lucy (coming up next…)

Mrs. Lucy Carrington Wertheim’s 1947 book on her 1930’s gallery “adventures” with two examples from one of her discoveries: the painter Christopher Wood with “The Yellow Horse” and “The Yellow Man” (circa 1920’s I assume, since he died in 1930)… turns out (thanks to Google) he’s a famous British artist whose work is in the Tate.

Some antique art: A 3 minute painting from the 1880’s and a book cover and title page from 1884. Double jeopardy!

Three example pages from my “Daily Archive” sheets: the first one composed of those little bits left on the walls after the poster is ripped down, the others are of the “under the radar” graphic design that surrounds us.

An Allen Hori, Richard Bates ad from 1996 and a 1990 page by David Frej, classmates at Cranbrook in the late 1980’s.

The wonderful Canadian lettering artist, Marion Banjtes sent me this several years ago…it took me a while to figure it out that it was addressed to me.

My 3 year old grand daughter made me this Holiday card. I take it those are ornaments in the front, the back is “writing”, or so she thinks…

Stay tuned for more Faculty Finds.

The Australian show Designer People did an episode on Ed Fella who is faculty in the graphic design program at CalArts.

View the entire zine, spread by spread below. Enjoy, Happy Holidays and New Year.