Leslie Saiz (Graphic Design 1997) is always working. By day she's the managing producer and creative director for Petpet Park at Nickelodeon's Virtual Worlds Group, the creators of all of Nick's online virtual worlds content.

Nights and weekends you'll find her either volunteering her time for creative organizations in her East Los Angeles community -- such as Self Help Graphics & Art, a nonprofit center providing youth art classes in printmaking and graphic arts -- or working on her own projects at Ex-Voto Design, a creative lab she's developed with her husband, Stephen Saiz.

Watching their Carnaval float moving down Mission Street as part of San Francisco's massive annual parade, laden with dancers from the Brazilian troupe Sambaxé, accompanied by the vibrant beats of the Brazilian musical group Blocura and the powerful moves of the Brazilian ABADA Capoeira troupe, TV cameras rolling, people cheering from the sidewalks and the rooftops high above. . . It was a triumphant moment for CCA faculty member Sandra Vivanco and the 15 students in her Body and Spectacle course.

The Carnaval parade was the culmination of a semester of hard work and intensive collaboration -- not only among the CCA students, but also in coordination with a group of high school students enrolled in the Out of Site Youth Arts Center, the city of San Francisco, experts in construction and transportation, and beyond. The CCA course was offered under the auspices of Diversity Studies and attracted a correspondingly wide-ranging bunch, from Architecture and Interior Design to Graphic Design, Illustration, Fashion Design, and Painting/Drawing.

The students designed not only the Carnaval float structure, but also the costumes and props that made its appearance in the parade a real performance rather than just a potential site for one. They had done as much work as they could in the CCA shops, and then transported the pieces to Pier 40, where the city graciously donated space for final assembly.

Paula Hayes
Monacelli Press, 2012
Hardcover, 240 pages, $50

Leah Koransky (Graphic Design 2008) designed this book about the artist Paula Hayes, who is most famous for her exquisite, high-end art terrariums of organically shaped, handblown glass. But her affinity for all things green extends to full gardens as well. She has created more than 20 full gardens for private clients around the country. This volume, the first monograph on her work, is structured in a two-part format that devotes equal attention to both.

Hayes has been a fixture of the New York art scene for more than two decades. Her installation in the lobby of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Nocturne of the Limax Maximus, garnered much critical acclaim and landed her a feature on CBS Sunday Morning. She has an oversized terrarium in the lobby of Lever House in New York, and a solo exhibition on her work was held at the Wexler Art Center in Columbus, Ohio, where she also installed a permanent garden adjacent to the museum's main entrance.

Sputnik is CCA's in-house, award-winning undergraduate design studio. Sputnik is a unique model that simulates (and in many ways certainly is) a typical professional client/agency relationship, where the client is a CCA staff member with a project, and the agency is Sputnik. Graphic Design faculty member Bob Aufuldish has been the faculty advisor for Sputnik since its inception in 1995.

Aufuldish has taught at CCA since 1991. In 1990 he cofounded the graphic design studio Aufuldish & Warinner. He has designed diverse projects for such clients as Adobe, Advent Software, the American Institute of Architects, the Center for Creative Photography, the Denver Art Museum, Emigre, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1995 he launched the digital type foundry fontBoy to manufacture and distribute his fonts.

Here he talks to Nathanael Cho, Deborah Lao, and Liz Tran, all current Sputnik students, about the Sputnik experience. The interview was part of an exhibition-making advanced studio course led by Jon Sueda, in which the three were enrolled in spring 2012.

How did the idea for CCA's student-staffed, in-house design studio come about?

In 1995, the CCA board committee overseeing publicity was reviewing all the stuff the college was publishing. The chair of that committee was a former advertising agency person, and he said, "This stuff is terrible. We need to do something about this." At the time, the college didn't have the resources to hire people to design everything and manage all the projects that needed to go out.

David Meckel (now CCA's director of research and planning) knew I had gone to a school that had an in-house graphic design studio staffed by students. I told him what that program was like, and we decided to start something like it here. In the beginning, it was myself working with CCA vice president for communications Chris Bliss and two students, Eric Heiman and Nadine Stellavato. We didn't do a lot of work -- just a few projects here and there. This is because people were a bit skeptical about a group of students being able to pull off important projects. My attitude always was: All you need to do is point students in the right direction, and they'll do great work. I was right!