Designs on the Future : As the computer industry shifts from equipment to content, L.A. and its digital media companies are stealing the spotlight and reshaping the Southern California economy.
We have seen the future of Southern California’s economy, and it is: the Barbie Fashion Designer.
It’s a graphics-heavy “activity application” (read: computer game) that allows little girls to design fashions for Barbie, model them on a computer screen, print the design on special fabric-backed paper and assemble a finished dress.
Not that this new CD-ROM game represents a major advance in Western civilization. Rather, it’s what’s behind the game that’s important: artists, fashion designers, computer graphics specialists and other creative professionals who are forming the nucleus of a new economic order in Southern California.
The companies that make digital media products such as the Barbie Fashion Designer are the latest wave of design-based industries to take root, joining film, TV, autos, fashion, architecture and others to form a powerful concentration of creativity that’s reshaping the Southern California economy and American popular culture.
This evolution is due in part to computers and the changing focus of that industry, which increasingly values innovative content as much as fancy hardware or software. As that happens, Los Angeles and its community of artists and designers are gaining in importance and stealing the spotlight from the gearheads and code nerds of Silicon Valley and Seattle.
“We see the future of design expanding from the design of objects to the design of information, and it’s a historic shift,” said David Brown, president of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
At the same time, the boundaries among film, art, product design and business services have blurred, leading to an unprecedented cross-pollination of new ideas that is finding particularly fertile ground in Southern California.
It’s also leading to some notable rhetorical flourishes. “Not since the Renaissance has art played such an important role in commerce,” said Scott Ross, chief executive of Digital Domain, a computer special-effects studio that is a partner in the development of the Barbie game.
“This industry has just gone through the roof,” Ross said. “Don’t tell your children to grow up to be cowboys, or doctors, or lawyers. Tell them to be digital artists, because the salaries and opportunities are incredible.”
Consider just one sector of the economy: movie production and amusements, where much of the new creative talent is concentrated. Employment in the industry has surpassed that of aerospace in Los Angeles and Orange counties, according to a Times computer analysis of state employment data.
Last year, movie production and amusements accounted for 208,900 jobs in the two counties, compared with 121,400 in aerospace. Film and entertainment added 18,800 jobs in 1995, or 1 1/2 new jobs for every aerospace job lost in the same period, the analysis shows.
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And the wages are good: L.A. County motion picture salaries averaged $32,743 annually in 1993, well above the $28,471 average for all county jobs, according to a Times analysis of census data.
Southern California as a wellspring for design and entertainment is nothing new: It started when the first silent films were shot in the 1920s and the first hot rods were customized in the 1930s.
In the 1970s, the first of the major auto makers opened design studios in Southern California, trying to capture the elusive spirit of the most car-centric culture in the world.
By the 1980s, the California-bred casual fashions of designers such as Guess? and Carole Little had captured national markets, and local architects from Frank Gehry to Frank Israel popularized the “L.A. School” of architecture worldwide.
Now the much-touted marriage of Silicon Valley and Hollywood is producing ever more products and services, according to Stephen Levy, senior economist and director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.
What are all these new workers doing? Some are creating products such as the Barbie game, which is due to hit toy stores in October.
The game evolved as a joint venture between Digital Domain, the studio co-founded by filmmaker James Cameron (“Terminator 2: Judgment Day”) and Mattel Inc., the world’s largest toy maker.
It came together, like many others, from the burgeoning pool of digital artists and entrepreneurs who grew up in the film industry and who are now moving beyond it to dream up an array of new products, services and companies.
Ross, Digital Domain’s chief executive and a former executive in filmmaker George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic special-effects firm, is an acquaintance of Doug Glen, Mattel’s new-media executive, who was a game developer for Lucasfilm Ltd.
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There are other examples of the crossover: A onetime set decorator now designs restaurants, film special-effects people are creating CD-ROM games and architects are designing film studios.
Jonathan Katz, a movie industry veteran and onetime aide to former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., started his firm, Cinnabar, in 1982 as a traditional scenic design, set-building and special-effects house for film and television. But Katz saw that the firm’s skills could be applied to nonentertainment businesses as well.
“We are independent consultants for companies that want . . . to sprinkle that entertainment pixie dust in other environments--restaurants, retail, public spaces,” he said.
The idea has flowered. Cinnabar’s creative energies have helped shape restaurants, animated billboards, the holiday display at Radio City Music Hall, even the H.G. Wells-style time machine used in a Las Vegas special-effects show.
Its biggest challenge lies ahead: It has won a contract to reconceive the image and design of the Taco Bell fast-food restaurants.
Cinnabar’s annual revenue of $14 million or so has been growing nearly 20% a year, Katz said. The firm now employs 118 people in Los Angeles and 70 in Orlando, Fla.
UCLA geography professor Allen Scott calls the agglomeration of design-based industries in Southern California “cultural-products industries.” In a new paper, he stresses their growing importance to the region’s economic base as more traditional manufacturing industries, such as aerospace, wane.
In 1962, industries such as apparel, architecture, advertising, furniture design and movie production employed more than 166,000 people in Los Angeles County, Scott wrote, citing census data. By 1991, that figure had more than doubled to nearly 365,000, according to Scott, who is also associate dean of UCLA’s School of Public Policy and Social Research.
By 1995, The Times computer analysis of state employment data shows, cultural industries such as movies, apparel, audio and video production were among the fastest-growing in Los Angeles County.
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“Employment in the cultural-products industries of Los Angeles County is now greater than it is in high-technology [mainly aerospace-defense sectors],” Scott wrote. “Since 1991, moreover, the gap between the two groups has grown even wider as the cultural-products industries have continued to expand, and as high-technology industry has declined.”
Southern California is uniquely positioned to capitalize on such growth, largely because it already has such a large community of artists and designers. Designers come here with the idea of selling to the movie industry, then branching out into other things.
There is one small but particularly influential group of industrial artists that has quietly called Southern California home for decades: the auto designers. Sixteen auto makers have design studios in Southern California, representing the world’s largest geographical concentration of automotive styling designers, according to a study sponsored by the California Arts Council.
The influence of Southern California tastes can be seen in a variety of vehicles. Chrysler’s new Plymouth Prowler, a hot-rod-like roadster going into production next year, takes its design cues directly from the custom-car culture of Los Angeles streets.
“As people are having to spend a significant amount of their income to purchase a car, they want something more than just an appliance, and that’s pretty well exemplified in Southern Californians’ very aesthetic love affair with their cars,” said Neil Walling, a design director for Chrysler Corp. and 1966 graduate of the Art Center College of Design.
The auto makers’ largess has been responsible in part for the success of design institutions such as the Art Center College of Design. Now such designers and their proteges are turning their attention to new of products.
Michael Liedtke came to Los Angeles from his job as a designer at Mercedes-Benz in Germany to McDonnell Douglas’ Douglas Aircraft Co. in Long Beach, where he now designs airplanes.
“There’s this laid-back motor culture, this sunny mentality,” he said.
Spurred by that, he persuaded his bosses at Douglas to look outside the aircraft industry for new ideas for the cockpit design of a new generation of jetliners.
As a result, McDonnell Douglas became the first aerospace company to sponsor a project by design students at the art center, normally known for producing automotive designers.
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The final product: a speculative flight deck that breaks most of the rules of aerospace design, but incorporates ideas drawn from cars, ergonomically friendly work spaces and even furniture. The flight deck looks like it would be at home on a vehicle out of “Star Trek.”
“The students threw a bunch of stuff overboard,” Liedtke said at an art center showcase this month. “I’m sure a lot of their ideas will end up being used.”
David Brown, the art center’s president, said demand for his students has never been greater, particularly among firms hungry for digital designers. Starting salaries can be as high as $50,000 a year, he said.
Kevin Fallon, 24, is typical of this new generation of designers. A second-year student from Minnesota who worked on the student team that developed the new Douglas flight deck, Fallon earned an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering before heading west to study industrial design.
“I think it’s a city unlike any other,” he said of Los Angeles. “It’s got its own energy and its own vibe that really intrigues a lot of people and attracts that kind of creativity.”
Several Art Center grads have ended up at Digital Domain, which produced the Oscar-nominated special effects for “Apollo 13.” Started just three years ago, the firm has ballooned to 350 artists, designers and technicians in a warren of sound stages and computer terminals in Venice.
Though the firm continues to provide special effects for film and TV (including an upcoming Cameron film about the Titanic), it has since branched out into commercials (the Budweiser frogs), music videos (Michael Jackson), CD-ROM games and theme park attractions such as a new 12-minute, 3-D film based on “Terminator 2” scheduled to open next month at Universal Studios in Florida.
And Ross has his eye on the future. A new partnership with cable TV giant Cox Enterprises Inc. will set the stage for the firm’s third phase: high-resolution interactive programming, delivered over coaxial cable.
“I think there’s a great future,” he said. “Once some sort of digital infrastructure is in place to deliver content to the home that has more bandwidth than this lousy Internet that everybody’s so excited about, then it becomes the great business opportunity of the next century.”
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Creative Push
Creative industries such as movies, amusements and fashion have overshadowed more traditional sectors such as aerospace and high-tech, according to a Times computer analysis of average annual employment data for the combined Los Angeles and Orange counties from 1989 to 1995.
Movies and amusements
Aerospace
Printing and publishing
High tech
Apparel and textiles
Source: California Employment Development Department, Los Angeles Times.
