Amin Torres could be the poster child for all that The Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design stands for, all it can do for a talented Dominican design student who has the drive, ambition, and intuition to make it in the design world.
When Amin arrived at Altos de Chavón from his home town of Cabrera in the North of the Dominican Republic, he was hopelessly starry-eyed. He had been dreaming about the school in Altos de Chavón, La Romana. His father, a policeman, and his mother, a teacher, were reluctant to have him leave home for a residential school so far away. No one suspected that those first daring steps would be the launch of his career as a designer, let alone one who would go on to win prizes and earn a handsome living as a high-tech designer in New York City.
Amin with his mother at her graduation
Well, perhaps Amin suspected it. During his time at The Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design he maintained a 4.0 index; to say that he worked himself with a level of obsession for excellence rarely equaled would be a gross understatement. He was determined to succeed as few before him ever had. Ultimately, he graduated Summa Cum Laude from The School of Design and was short-listed for the commencement speech.
Amin’s first shaky steps in New York included arriving with US$80 in his pocket and the dubious luxury of an invitation to sleep in the Bronx living room of a cousin. And at that time his English was rudimentary, to say the least. His scholarship stipulated that he’d have to spend three years instead of the usual two required of Altos de Chavón transfers; the extra year was to bring his English up to par. In fact, he turned out to be such a good English student that he cut a half year off the time until he was allowed to take regular studio and lecture classes.
While at Parsons, Amin worked in the Altos de Chavón office as a student aide. At a certain point I connected him with John Blackford, an amazing digital sound and video guru who taught at Parsons and had a studio on 14th Street. Amin worked tirelessly with Blackford, who took to him at once. However long John needed him to work, he worked: sweeping, getting coffee, schlepping material and equipment—Amin loved it all. He learned language from John, and life lessons. John became his guardian angel and mentor, and Amin developed the work ethic that is his hallmark: he was in high gear. Also, long hours with John meant free food and a respite from the Bronx living room.
With only a year of Parsons under his belt, Amin won a FWA award for his design of a website for Greg Crossley; you can see it at http://www.thefwa.com/profile/amin-torres
That led to an internship at the legendary digital design studio Robert Greenberg Associates R/GA, through a recommendation from Parsons professor Joseph Cartman, who at the time was the creative director for Nike at R/GA.
Currently Amin is an associate creative director at R/GA, having spent seven and a half years with the company, working on such accounts as Nike, Chanel, Nokia, Microsoft, MasterCard, L’Oréal, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, AOL, Patch, Zynga, JCP UBank, and Barnes&Noble.
Miyamo Project
Amin’s work on the Miyamo Project won him the coveted Cannes Lion award in 2013. In late 2011 MasterCard approached R/GA with the need to engage and start a relationship with their younger customers, who range from high school kids whose parents provide them with pre-paid debit cards to young people starting and finishing college. The product innovation team (now called Group 8), where Amin works, saw an opportunity to create a unique tool for young music consumers to help them personalize and create visual playlists, and MasterCard was going to play a central role facilitating such experiences.
In essence, Miyamo scans your iTunes music library and associates colors with each genre. With meta-data such as play-count and the number of songs per genre within your playlists, Miyamo generates a visual representation of your music collection. As you listen to music, Miyamo keeps track of your music-consumption habits, generating an ever-changing visualization of how you listen. Each Music ID is a snapshot at a given point in time that can be shared, providing conversation starters on social-media platforms and also serving as a music-discovery tool, as you can see what your friends are listening to, as well.
Miyamo is a small piece of a larger ecosystem of apps (a Group 8 concept) and is the foundation of other MasterCard products and services to be released within the app as part of a larger roadmap.
Spread
Spread is a startup initiative that Amin has been working on for the last 12 months in collaboration with his co-founder and technology partner, Korbin Hoffman. Spread (see http://www.spread.cm) is a tool to crowd-source news and creative photography. It has two main offerings: photo requests and news images.
Photo requests enable creative and news organizations as well as individuals to post photo assignments directly to photographers. Photographers can then submit photo responses to these requests. Photo requests can be for both news and commercial photography. Request owners describe what they need via a photo brief and must state the intended use for the images requested. Submitting a photo response to a request implies that the photographer agrees with the intended use as stated by the request owner. All photo requests are prepaid to ensure participating photographers get paid when their images are selected.
News images are photos taken with Spread’s mobile app, and consumers, “pro-sumers,” and seasoned professional photographers can upload images of newsworthy events for immediate purchase. Bloggers and news organizations can purchase these images at two standardized prices and with standardized licenses. Spread is expected to launch later in 2013.
So this is what has become of Amin Torres. He credits his success to “a LOT of luck and lots of hard work, AND having two amazing parents who blindly supported me and sent me all the way across the island with very little money, with very little actual understanding of what/where they were sending me to.”
I’ll never forget when Amin’s father came to visit him at The Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design. He proudly pulled out his foundation year drawings to show his father—beautiful figure studies, careful two-dimensional compositions, landscapes, and still lifes. But all that his robust country farmer/former policeman father could see and understand was how painfully thin his son had become, and I saw the tears well up in his eyes. Like many of our scholarship students, Amin had been forgoing food to be able to buy paper and supplies. He was too considerate of his parents’ sacrifice to ask them for money, and he’d gotten very thin. After that, we kept tabs on Amin to get him to eat. Happily, it’s not a problem now.
An I-Pad app designed by Amin for Lancôme
A number of projects Amin has worked on include an I-Pad app for Lancôme, as well as a Lancôme advertising campaign featuring Toy Story, SketchIt – a simple iPhone app that allows you to quickly create and share drawings with friends. The following images are a collection of Amin’s work:
Article contributed by Stephen Kaplan
– Thank you Stephen!
Stephen Kaplan is the Rector of the Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design
About the Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design
A component of The Altos de Chavón Cultural Center Foundation, a U.S. 501(c)(3) public charity, the Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design has been graduating students from its two-year associate-degree program, affiliated with New York City’s prestigious Parsons “The New School For Design” since 1983.
Three majors are offered: Graphic Design, Fashion Design, and Fine Arts/Illustration. In addition, The School has developed a state-of-the-art Certificate Program in Digital Design.
Click here for more articles, photos and info about the Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design!
Spanish
Amin Torres could be the poster child for all that The Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design stands for, all it can do for a talented Dominican design student who has the drive, ambition, and intuition to make it in the design world.
When Amin arrived at Altos de Chavón from his home town of Cabrera in the North of the Dominican Republic, he was hopelessly starry-eyed. He had been dreaming about the school in Altos de Chavón, La Romana. His father, a policeman, and his mother, a teacher, were reluctant to have him leave home for a residential school so far away. No one suspected that those first daring steps would be the launch of his career as a designer, let alone one who would go on to win prizes and earn a handsome living as a high-tech designer in New York City.
While at Parsons, Amin worked in the Altos de Chavón office as a student aide. At a certain point I connected him with John Blackford, an amazing digital sound and video guru who taught at Parsons and had a studio on 14th Street. Amin worked tirelessly with Blackford, who took to him at once. However long John needed him to work, he worked: sweeping, getting coffee, schlepping material and equipment—Amin loved it all. He learned language from John, and life lessons. John became his guardian angel and mentor, and Amin developed the work ethic that is his hallmark: he was in high gear. Also, long hours with John meant free food and a respite from the Bronx living room.
With only a year of Parsons under his belt, Amin won a FWA award for his design of a website for Greg Crossley; you can see it at http://www.thefwa.com/profile/amin-torres
That led to an internship at the legendary digital design studio Robert Greenberg Associates R/GA, through a recommendation from Parsons professor Joseph Cartman, who at the time was the creative director for Nike at R/GA.
Currently Amin is an associate creative director at R/GA, having spent seven and a half years with the company, working on such accounts as Nike, Chanel, Nokia, Microsoft, MasterCard, L’Oréal, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, AOL, Patch, Zynga, JCP UBank, and Barnes&Noble.
Amin’s work on the Miyamo Project won him the coveted Cannes Lion award in 2013. In late 2011 MasterCard approached R/GA with the need to engage and start a relationship with their younger customers, who range from high school kids whose parents provide them with pre-paid debit cards to young people starting and finishing college. The product innovation team (now called Group 8), where Amin works, saw an opportunity to create a unique tool for young music consumers to help them personalize and create visual playlists, and MasterCard was going to play a central role facilitating such experiences. In essence, Miyamo scans your iTunes music library and associates colors with each genre. With meta-data such as play-count and the number of songs per genre within your playlists, Miyamo generates a visual representation of your music collection. As you listen to music, Miyamo keeps track of your music-consumption habits, generating an ever-changing visualization of how you listen. Each Music ID is a snapshot at a given point in time that can be shared, providing conversation starters on social-media platforms and also serving as a music-discovery tool, as you can see what your friends are listening to, as well.
Miyamo is a small piece of a larger ecosystem of apps (a Group 8 concept) and is the foundation of other MasterCard products and services to be released within the app as part of a larger roadmap.
Spread is a startup initiative that Amin has been working on for the last 12 months in collaboration with his co-founder and technology partner, Korbin Hoffman. Spread (see http://www.spread.cm) is a tool to crowd-source news and creative photography. It has two main offerings: photo requests and news images. Photo requests enable creative and news organizations as well as individuals to post photo assignments directly to photographers. Photographers can then submit photo responses to these requests. Photo requests can be for both news and commercial photography. Request owners describe what they need via a photo brief and must state the intended use for the images requested. Submitting a photo response to a request implies that the photographer agrees with the intended use as stated by the request owner. All photo requests are prepaid to ensure participating photographers get paid when their images are selected. News images are photos taken with Spread’s mobile app, and consumers, “pro-sumers,” and seasoned professional photographers can upload images of newsworthy events for immediate purchase. Bloggers and news organizations can purchase these images at two standardized prices and with standardized licenses. Spread is expected to launch later in 2013.
Article contributed by Stephen Kaplan – Thank you Stephen! Stephen Kaplan is the Rector of the Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design
A component of The Altos de Chavón Cultural Center Foundation, a U.S. 501(c)(3) public charity, the Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design has been graduating students from its two-year associate-degree program, affiliated with New York City’s prestigious Parsons “The New School For Design” since 1983. Three majors are offered: Graphic Design, Fashion Design, and Fine Arts/Illustration. In addition, The School has developed a state-of-the-art Certificate Program in Digital Design. Click here for more articles, photos and info about the Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design!