The square, open lobby of the Joseph Centeno Betteravia Government Center echoed with the eager voices of a well-dressed family, obviously awaiting their turn for a marriage ceremony as the afternoon sunlight spilled through the windows. Various members of the group were assembling and rearranging for a photo op, and on either side and behind the throng, an array of plexiglass-framed art hung as part of the exhibit Revealed: Graphic Design at Allan Hancock College.
“One of the benefits of showing my students’ work here is it’s going to be memorialized in people’s wedding albums for years,” said Allan Hancock College Graphic Design Instructor Nancy Jo Ward.
The government center is also home to the Betteravia Gallery North and South, where the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission showcases local art. Ward was asked to assemble a show for the gallery that showcased several students’ progress across several years’ worth of classes. Students who graduate with a degree in graphic design must take several classes, including Intro to Graphics, Digital Imagery, Digital Illustration, Web Design, and Typography.
The students used state-of-the-art equipment and programs to complete the myriad tasks and projects the program requires, Ward said, including Wacom tablets, the Adobe software suite, and iMac computers. But mastering the technology is just one aspect of the program, she explained.
“We try to teach not just technology, but conceptual development,” she said. “They have to have good, fundamental design skills and should still know how to draw and get an idea out of their head and onto the paper.”
Ward has decades of experience as a professional graphic designer locally and uses her skills to help students complete projects that will prepare them for professional design work. Several of the pieces include clothing design, sports apparel design, and even skateboards.
Santa Barbara County in particular is a great place for a certain kind of design work, which is featured heavily through the show at the Betteravia Gallery, Ward explained.
“Santa Maria is a great area for package design, because we’re an agricultural hotbed, and they need package design, even if it’s just the plastic package that wraps around the lettuce,” she said. “Package design is huge and will continue to be because there are all kinds of new food and beverage products.”
The package designs reveal a little bit about each student—some designed for sweet treats and others for beer bottles—including attitude, style, and playfulness. They also created more personal pieces, like for the interior space project, which tasked the studying designers with creating an image of an interior space that was also indicative of an emotion.
Showing a variety of work for each student illustrates the progress they made along their educational path, and provides a testament to the wide range of skills they accrued while studying at Hancock.
“One of the amazing things about being a teacher is, you give all the students the project with the same criteria, and at the end you are often surprised, because you didn’t know they had that light of brilliance going on, because it doesn’t often show up sitting in class,” Ward said. “They don’t have a style when they come in, or they don’t think they do, but I can help them kind of figure it out, because they do have things they like and things that they don’t.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne is glad the Sun has such talented designers. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 23-30, 2015.