Success Stories
Design Grads Put Creativity To Work
Story by Chris Cunningham
 |
| Featured on the cover: Lada Korol, Lane Graphic Design program graduate; Aaron and Cory Graham, Lane Multimedia Design program graduates |
“I loved Lane’s small classes. The instructors took the time with us.” —Lada Korol
Even as a young child growing up in Moscow, Russia, Lada Korolknew she had a creative bent. But it wasn’t until she and her family had emigrated to the U.S. that she felt compelled to pursue a career in the graphic arts. When she was 16, a scholarship to attend a three-week pre-college art program paved the way.
After completing the program, Korol says, “I was completely hooked.” She remembers telling her mother, “This is what I want to do with my life. These computers are so cool.” She was thrilled to see how graphic design wedded her artistic and technical aptitudes. She couldn’t wait to begin her work in earnest.
Korol left South Eugene High School that year and enrolled in Lane’s Adult High School. She first earned her high school diploma, and two years later, completed the Graphic Design program—one of two professional technical media options in the college’s Art and Applied Design Department. The program prepares students for entry-level positions in the fields of graphic and digital design. Through Lane’s curricula, they learn to create a variety of graphic materials for advertising, corporate identity, packaging, signage, and the Web.
Korol honed her abilities as a student intern with Lane’s Printing/Graphics service and then at Funk/Levis & Associates, a Eugene-based marketing communications firm.
“I loved Lane’s small classes,”says the 26-year-old Korol.“The instructors took the time with us.”
One such instructor was Thomas Rubick, who describes Korol “as immensely talented” and one of his “most successful students, despite her youth and the fact that her path was more convoluted and arduous than most,”referring to her family’s emigration from Russia in the early ’90s.
Korol’s appreciation for her training at Lane deepened when she transferred to Oregon State University and majored in graphic design. After her first quarter, she realized, “The skills that Lane gave me turned out to be at a much higher level than what second year OSU kids come out of there with,” Korol says. “I had all the software skills.”
After earning a bachelor of fine arts degree in 2000, she landed back at Funk/Levis & Associates as one of five graphic designers. As a member of the company’s design team, she has learned to work rapidly and to juggle as many as a dozen projects at a time. Right now, she is crafting internal signage for a bank and consumer mailers for a hospital. Earlier, she helped the same clients create ads, banners and posters.
“What I love about my job here is that the work I do spans so many industries,”Korol says. “I’m always encountering new challenges and problems to solve.”
In multimedia, the second professional technical media option offered by the Art and Applied Design Department, students prepare for entry-level positions in industries that use video and graphic images, animation, interactive multimedia, games, and web sites. They train hands-on in the college’s state-of-the-art video and audio production studios.
Multimedia program coordinator and instructor Rick Simms says, “Our goal is to help students combine both the left and the right sides of the brain,” which is why the staff “peppers our curriculum with art classes.”
Simms himself is well versed in three-dimensional computer graphics, animation, layout and design, and photography. His diverse skill set is representative of other instructors in the Arts Division, says Division Chair Rick Williams, explaining that the college’s art instructors are artists and designers with extensive experience in commercial and fine arts. “Most of them still produce art off-hours,” Williams says.
“This brings a breadth and strength to the arts program that you don’t find everywhere,” Williams says. “They have hands-on experience and contacts in the community and in the industry, so they can help students” make contacts in their areas of interest.
Lane alum Aaron Graham says his current work designing technical manuals and marketing materials at Monaco Coach, a Eugene area luxury motor coach manufacturer, is immensely gratifying. Crafting owners’ manuals is highly technical and requires a fastidious eye for detail. On the other hand, producing company calendars, posters and interactive animation for PowerPoint software program presentations gives him the chance to satisfy his multimedia craving for animation and cartoon design.
Even before Aaron’s wife Corey Graham graduated from Lane in 2002 with an associate of arts degree, she had landed a part-time job as a web designer at Monaco Coach. Now, four years later, she serves as the company’s artistic director for web development.
“Lane helped me get started,” says Cory,who was 34 weeks pregnant at the time the cover photo was taken. “We touched on just enough in school that I could take it further.” Both Cory and Aaron polished their talents with internships at Proscenia Interactive, an independent media group: She produced a client Web site, while he completed an interactive multimedia project. Afterward, Aaron interned as a 3-Dartist at Pipeworks Software Inc., a local independent studio that develops entertainment software. Rubick and Simms acknowledge that the market for designers and multimedia specialists is highly competitive. But, Simms says, if students enthusiastically “pound the pavement,” they stand a good chance of finding work.
