Their official name is Design | Media Arts. But “Desma,” the affectionate abbreviation tossed around for the department in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, seems much more fitting when one observes its students’ casually creative, communal vibe.
Comprising 0.8 percent of UCLA’s undergraduate population (roughly 200 of 25,000), the selective nature of the department is reflected in the subculture of its students, who began classes in the new Broad Art Center this fall. They’ve already made themselves at home.
“When finals time comes around, we sleep in the common area (on the fourth floor),” said Peter Ng, a fourth-year Design | Media Arts student. “Everyone brings their toothbrushes and we all brush our teeth in the bathroom. It’s pretty cool because you procrastinate sometimes and show up at 4 a.m. right before your deadline and everyone else is in the lab from your class.”
This sense of camaraderie and creativity is certainly visible. As the elevator doors part on the fourth floor, the first sight greeting the students groggily making their way to their 9 a.m. typography class is a smattering of bright announcements, assorted anonymous doodles, and finished projects. The walls behind them glow white, smooth down to the cement-colored stone floor. Unlike the beige tunnels of Haines Hall, this space gives off creative vibes of its own.
Though Ng doesn’t frequent any other buildings besides the Broad Art Center, he sees benefits in attending an academic conglomerate like UCLA for design.
“You’re not strictly at an art school. You meet a lot of people who are in different schools studying completely different things, and they can teach you a lot,” he said.
But the department itself is not homogenous by any means.
“If you’re into animation, you’re in a class where people illustrate, do photography, shoot film, or are into sound design. You really learn a lot through diversity,” Ng said. “People like to help each other, and someone always has something to teach another person.”
Ng has internalized this idea of applying taught and shared knowledge to advance his career. After working at DreamWorks for one year in the marketing and development departments, Ng moved on to an internship with Big Machine doing motion graphics.
“They say your talent can only get you 50 percent of the way, and the other 50 percent is connections and getting your foot in the door in the industry,” he said. “They taught me a lot of things in the design department: theory and fundamentals, how to come up with an idea, and how to express that idea.”
Ng’s favorite design class was “Dynamic Typography” (Design | Media Arts 155), which he took under master of fine arts student Peter Cho. Ng learned how to storyboard and animate an idea by drawing the concept on paper, putting it onto a computer, and finally executing it using technology.
What made his experience was Cho’s positive guidance, Ng said. Cho would always find ways to improve Ng’s work without giving explicit directions.
Ng’s talents have also developed through mentorship from professors in the department, such as Rebecca Allen, who is helping him with his senior project. He is in the process of finishing a short animation called “I Hate You,” about a little boy who learns how to be more accepting.
In Design | Media Arts, exams are not given, but learning is rewarded. This seems like every student’s dream, but the rigorous demands of the program are not to be underestimated.
“The grading basis here isn’t about the top artists or top students,” Ng said. “There’s no quota. If you do well, you do well. If you do poorly, you do poorly. It’s a really nonhostile environment here.”
In line with this attitude, Professor Henri Lucas launches into his typography lecture with encouraging words: “You guys are in a great place. There are some very interesting things happening.”
George Brower sits in the back row of Lucas’s classroom, sitting behind a computer with his fellow first-years. He listens and clicks around Adobe InDesign as Lucas lists cyan, magenta, yellow and black, the four main colors that blend to create any imaginable color.
The group is introduced to the Pantone Matching System, a standardized ink color system that is commonly used in the graphic arts. Lucas quickly moves on, referencing a colleague, Vasa Mihich, who teaches the relationships of color and how to use it effectively to communicate.
“I met most of my friends in … Mihich’s color and drawing classes,” Brower said. “The knowledge you’re getting is hard to verbalize. It’s all about perception and fine-tuning the eye as a muscle. I came out of it seeing differently.”
Brower agrees with Ng that there is a connection among Design | Media Arts students at UCLA.
As a New Yorker, Brower has come a long way to be a part of this department, which seduced him with its variety. The range of potential in the program is as broad as the aspirations brought into it.
“It’s a really small density of people who are interested in the same thing: emerging forms of design and art. Art kids who like computers are the stereotype. … You can’t help but bump into someone who has a different mind-set or interests, so you really learn a lot from your peers,” Brower said. “You can’t find a stereotypical design student.”
After 30 minutes of lecturing, Lucas turns his students loose to mix colors on their computer screens, challenging them to get in some good work and create an appropriate color scheme for text of Oscar Wilde’s book title, “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
Brower has many classes ahead of him: many projects, creative feats and long nights to be spent on the fourth-floor common area. But so far, so good ““ he is turning his newly trained eye inward to assess his personal progress.
“I’ve come out of most of my classes with either a firm sense of what my professors were trying to teach me or with the door opened to something else that I want to learn,” Brower said. “You’ll have new questions in mind that you’ll want to pursue yourself.”