Join Us This Summer For
Design Class
Be a part of our week-long camp to
explore design with other young creatives
Reserve Your Spot
Join Us This Summer For
Design Class offers summer camps and immersive year-round
design education built on creativity and collaboration.
Learn to think and create with
agency, curiosity, and care.
The Design Class summer camp immerses students in hands-on exploration across a range of design disciplines while introducing them to how design functions in the real world. Through offsite visits to local designers and onsite guest speakers from fields including fashion, interior design, photography, and digital design, students gain exposure to diverse creative career paths. Using an experiential, process-driven approach, students complete a portfolio-worthy project and build confidence in both creating and professionally presenting their work.
Little Design Class introduces students to creative thinking and design through age-appropriate, hands-on projects developed alongside professional designers. Through playful prompts, collaborative games, and guided making, students are encouraged to experiment, explore, and share their unique ideas. This exploratory approach fosters curiosity and confidence while introducing the foundational principles of design in a fun and supportive environment.
SoBeCa Arts District
Costa Mesa, CA
Camp days are designed with creative brains in mind. Through guided inspiration activations, students are taught how to initiate their own creative process. With dual emphasis on learning and application, the objective of each day is to expose students to both the excitement and practicalities of designing at the expert level.
Friday is presentation day where family and friends are welcome to see their student present what they have created throughout the week.
Each Design Class student leaves with the understanding that with intention, we get to design our own lives.
Creativity lives in all of us. It can be practiced, challenged, refined, and grown over time. Designers shape how we live, communicate, build, and imagine the future, and every young person deserves the opportunity to discover how their unique creativity can contribute to the kind of world they hope to see. Young people deserve serious creative education; real tools, real mentorship, and real respect for their potential. This foundational belief is why Design Class exists.
Collaboration is not a compromise of creativity, but rather a powerful catalyst. The strongest ideas rarely come from a single mind. When young people exchange ideas, offer feedback, and draw inspiration from one another, their work becomes more thoughtful and more alive. At Design Class, students build alongside one another, learning how to gather inspiration with respect, give and receive critique with generosity, and contribute to a creative community that makes room for everyone.
In today’s culture of passive consumption, taking creative initiative is a courageous act. Design Class empowers youth to believe in their ideas and the tools that they have on hand to bring those ideas to life. We aim to build confidence not only in imagination, but in action. In an encouraging environment, students act upon their creativity and experiment with visual communication, storytelling, and leadership, discovering that they are capable not just of dreaming, but of doing.
When creativity becomes an active practice rather than a passive impulse, life opens into something magical and meaningful.
Both deeply creative individuals, Mercedes and Carly have collaborated on many projects with design education at the center. They have a shared passion for education and believe strongly in its power to shape the world we live in. Both navigated the experience of being young, ambitious, and without a clear roadmap into the design world. That shared history is what led them to found Design Class: a program they wish had existed when they were starting out.
