Fashion, advertising, graphic design, if it’s an education in the world of art and design you are looking for, the Academy of Art University is where it can be found. 

As the country’s largest private school of art and design, the Academy of Art University, located in San Francisco, California, is renowned not only for the excellence of its undergraduate programs, but for masters degrees it offers for 12 of its programs as well.  The Academy offers 11 MFA degrees and a Masters of Architecture.

The Academy’s reputed masters program has enticed many industry professionals to return to school to earn their masters degree including award winning designer, Michael Osborne who received his MFA from the School of Graphic Design in 2007; MFA alumnus Christopher Cortez who won the Tommy Hilfiger reality television show The Cut; and Ihsan Al-Hammouri, also an MFA graduate who designed a series of Arabic language typefaces which are commercially available from Linotype.

Mastering the Details
Each masters program is detailed in its 2008 course guide titled Mastery.  To design Mastery, the school’s president, Dr. Elisa Stephens, enlisted the best possible design team for the project – the Academy’s own School of Graphic Design.  “What better team to create a book that personifies the level of expertise of our faculty, and the quality of our programs?  We couldn’t be more pleased with the book,” said Dr. Stephens.

The design team for Mastery consisted of Mary Scott, chair of School of Graphic Design; Phil Hamlett, graduate director of School of Graphic Design; and Hunter Wimmer, associate director of School of Graphic Design.

Mastery, aptly named for the directive of the university’s masters program – to emphasize the mastery of the profession – is a beautifully designed perfect bound book full of artwork and imagery created by Academy graduate students.  “We are very happy with how the piece turned out.  Giving the book a smaller format than is typical for a program guide created a thicker book, providing it with more heft and sophistication,” said Phil Hamlett.

Hamlett, who heads up the sustainability initiatives for the School of Graphic Design, including teaching a class on sustainable design, and is co-chair of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) Center for Sustainable Design and the driving force behind its popular Compostmodern design conference. Accordingly, the paper selection for Mastery and the environmental impacts of printing 125,000 copies was made with environmental consequences in mind. 

Mastery’s Paper and the Environment
The Academy has a variety of school-wide initiatives in place to address sustainable business practice and design curriculum.  It is currently participating in a city-wide sponsorship program with Pacific Gas & Electric to curb power usage in San Francisco, and several academic programs within the Academy have collaborated with the city’s environmental department to promote its anti-junk mail campaign.

Internally, the Academy is implementing a number of environmentally conscious strategies including: removing bottled water coolers and replacing them with filtered tap water fountains; instituting an aggressive recycling program; using biodiesel fuel in its cars and busses, and sponsoring the Compostmodern design conference.

Hamlett chose to print Mastery on FSC-certified Mohawk Options 100% PC.  “The paper had to be high quality to show the students’ artwork in its best light.  Printing on uncoated paper is nontraditional so it was a bit of a leap of faith.  The results achieved what we had hoped for,” says Hamlett.

Printing Mastery on a 100 percent recycled fiber paper allowed the Academy of Art University to create significant environmental savings such as preserving 935 trees for future use, not creating 2,701lbs.of waterborne waste, not generating 43,966 lbs. of solid waste, not consuming 662,612,400 BTUs of energy, and preventing 86,568 lbs. of net greenhouse gases.

Because Mohawk Options is manufactured with the use of wind-generated electricity, the Academy created an additional savings equivalent to not generating 44,980 lbs. of air emissions, displacing the use of 19 barrels of crude oil, and planting 3,040 trees.

To learn more about Mohawk Options, please visit www.mohawkpaper.com

2/20/08