Famed French artist Edgar Degas once noted, “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
For students in Sandy Novak’s visual communications class, that job already halfway was done.
Students knew what they had to make youngsters in second though ninth grade see: themselves snagging their soaring dreams.
How they would accomplish that, well, that was the rub.
It proved the delicious dilemma Novak’s class faced thanks to a fortunate confluence: an artistic need at Lake-Sumter State College provided a real-world opportunity for students at Beacon College to highlight their artistic chops.
Last month, a Lake-Sumter State College official contacted Dr. James Fleming, Beacon’s chair of business and technology, seeking a graphic artist possibly to work as an intern on a new logo for the school’s Kids’ College. Underwritten by Lake-Sumter State College’s Continuing Education, the summer program for the past 26 years has provided scholastic, athletic and artistic enrichment for students in grades two through nine.
Fleming spoke with Novak, whose class coincidentally was transitioning into a section on logo creation. Novak, an associate professor in the business and technology department at Beacon — the first higher education institution accredited to award bachelor’s degrees primarily to students who learn differently — quickly coordinated with Lake-Sumter State College and “kicked into gear” the school’s as a Beacon class project.
Lake-Sumter 2017 theme is “Catching your dreams.” Every student in Novak’s class submitted two logo designs.
In the past, Lake-Sumter had employed graphic designers to hatch ideas for the yearly theme. However the college, Novak said, hoped Beacon students would deliver a “fresh and more relevant” design with a “kids talking to kids” vibe.
And Novak said, “It really worked.”
In the end, judges whittled the raft of logo drafts in her two visual communications classes to four finalists: Matt Adair, Sarah Brown, David Goldstein and Giancarlo Trocola.
Goldstein and Trocola emerged as the top two finalists.
“I talk with Miss Novak extensively on my designs and bounced a couple ideas off of her,” Goldstein, a sophomore said of his design. “I thought of doing it in a way that would be childish, but brings up childhood memories of outdoors and catching fireflies. This one seemed to hit the point that the Kids’ College wanted, so I went ahead with creating it.”
Ultimately, Lake-Sumter ultimately will be the arbiter, selecting one of the two students’ designs for its 2017 Kids’ College logo.
To the winner go the spoils: a gift card and bragging rights on a widely used logo.
Yet, no authentic artist creates for filthy lucre. Artists create for art’s sake — a sensibility resident in Trocola’s discussion of his work.
“Because their theme was ‘catch your dream,’ I was thinking more of a butterfly and some person catching it with a net or their hand reaching out for it,” said Trocola, a sophomore majoring in web/media, who ultimately revised the concept to feature “a butterfly and a rainbow coming out of the butterfly. The butterfly for me was the biggest thing for me because you want to catch a butterfly and you definitely want to catch a dream.”
Seems Russian-French artist Marc Chagall was right: “Great art picks up where nature ends.”