Glenn Baken
Part-time Assistant Professor
Email
bakeng@newschool.edu
Office Location
A - 66 West 12th Street
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Profile
I have been working in print continuously since my university graduation in 1984.
Photography was an early hobby, and a first job in high school. Four years at the School of Printing at RIT and a childhood around printers and designers was surprisingly not my most influential classroom. While I can say that “I grew up in the industry” – my father founded Medallion Assoc; a point of Sale printing company in 1962. Its my firm belief that the best training I received was as a busboy/waiter in the Catskills during the summers between semesters.
I have been teaching at Parsons since 1996. In all that time, everything has changed and nothing has changed. We have incredible technology to help us produce our projects. We still have the same problems. We cannot manufacture time. We cannot make up lost faith from a client. We rarely get the opportunity to make everyone happy.
I quickly realized that there was more to printing than ink on paper, so much more.Much like my experience working in the dining room, I found that producing the work was so much more involved than delivering files into prepress and picking out nice papers. Print production is a hospitality business. Every graphic designer should work as waiter / waitress or barista. Understanding customer service is so integral to our industry it should be a degree requirement.
Working with students as an educator is not different from working with clients as an educator. To be successful, it must be a collaboration. My goals as an instructor are to share from a career of practical experience. Analyzing case studies of projects that have failed as well as those that succeed is essential. Understanding why we are successful or more importantly in my opinion, why we were not is what I am still trying to learn.
Client list Includes:
BlackRock, Wolff Olins, Milk Makeup, Chandelier, The Criterion Collection, Ideo,
SY Partners, Smart Design, Yieldmo, Clarins USA, Interbrand, Refinery29
Degrees Held
BFA – Printing Science, Rochester Institute of Technology
Research Interests
Photography, Business Development, Marketing, Graphic Design, Cooking, Fly Fishing, Travel