Program: Illustration
The Design Division at CCA welcomes Mike Rianda as our second speaker in the 2023 Spring Design Lecture Series. These live lectures bring us together across time zones and disciplines as we meet leading designers, strategists, curators, and educators to speak about contemporary practice, discourse, and making.
Join one of CCA’s celebrated illustration graduates as he shares how he learned to accept fear (25%) as part of his creative process and merge it with inspiration (75%) to use both to chase his dreams (100%). In this talk, Rianda delights a packed house of illustrators and animators with his larger-than-life presence. Between exclamations of “yeah baby” and “oh shit!” Rianda zigs and zags through his angst-filled backstory of childhood fear and loneliness expressed in hilarious visual terms, his dynamic career trajectory in which he used fear as a driving force, and his rise to success as the creator of Gravity Falls and The Mitchells vs. the Machines.
Rianda’s presentation is animated with quirky characters (mostly his awkward childhood self) and humorous asides delivered with infectious energy, and bursts of audience engagement beginning with his callout of the leading animation houses that he was rejected from and an invitation to the audience to claim their own rejections out loud … really loud. With a spontaneous mid-point break to record the audience singing happy birthday to his dad, Rianda goes on to share the importance of learning empathy by living other people’s experiences through stories and a must-see list of films and animations. The talk ends with sage advice on making it in animation, and encouragement to fail more gloriously so that you can ultimately succeed in your creative work. Rianda’s talk is uproarious, yet completely sincere with a BIG heart open for his audience.
Authored by Mara Holt Skov
