Featured Course
Professional Car Design: The Basics
This noncredit course designed for aspiring car designers, professionals looking to refresh key skills, and prospective students teaches the foundational skills every transportation designer needs in their toolkit. During this guided nine-week course, students progress from simple sketching exercises to designing professional-looking vehicles with a sense of speed and emotion.
On set with ArtCenter Online
It changed the way that I design vehicles; I didn't know that you could use geometric shapes to make a car."
CrystalArtCenter Online student
Interview with Leon Paz, an instructor at ArtCenter Online and ArtCenter's Transportation Department
ArtCenter: How would you describe this class to a friend or a prospective student?
Leon Paz: This course covers visual communication, a core class in ArtCenter's Transportation Design Department. The skills taught in this course are what you need as a designer to express the vehicles of your imagination clearly on to a page. Learning the techniques in this class demands a lot of time and effort, but it will elevate your skills tenfold if you play hard.
AC: What inspired the direction you took with the curriculum for this class?
LP: I took a similar course when I was a student at ArtCenter, so I applied all my favorite assignments. I also wanted to provide a solid design foundation to create strong students capable of understanding what lies ahead in the curriculum. This course combines three classes into one: Perspective, Sketching and Vehicle Construction.
Vehicle Designs by Leon Paz
Change Lab Podcast 28: Recent Alum Vicente Magaña on Solving the Riddle of Mass Transit in California
AC: What are some of the unique tools students have access to through the online environment?
LP: We've had great results with the online course, and it's because the same learning process is applied whether a student is learning in a physical classroom or a virtual one. An advantage of taking the course online is that feedback can be recorded, so all points discussed in a student's work can be accessed later, which can mean better results than by taking notes alone. And unlike a classroom, the video demonstrations are available for students to watch multiple times.
AC: What are some of the most important concepts and ideas you hope students take away from the experience/classwork?
LP: In addition to perspective principles and fast sketching techniques, the course is heavily focused on the principals ArtCenter is founded on: great professionalism, being on time every time and completing challenging amounts of work — all while having serious fun!