The Product Design Department fonds is a top level archival unit that encompasses everything in the Archives created by the Product Design department. Under the fonds-level are the following collections: Product Design Department collection, Department Chairs collections, and Photograph collection.

The Product Design collection contains a handful of folders not created and accessioned from the Department Chairs office. Included are course syllabi, department brochures, and email announcements. Noteworthy items include a furniture exhibition booklet from 1950 and notes that accompany images from a Buckminster Fuller Shower project from 1980.

These Product Design Department files consist of files created by C. Martin Smith, Product Design Department Chair from 1987.

The bulk of the collection is sponsored projects and student work files. The sponsored projects (later known as Funded Educational Projects) files document product design projects from 1994 to 2003. The student work files contain samples of sketches, product ideas and class projects.

There are a few administrative files, consisting mainly of lists of students in product design classes. The computer files (almost all of which are on compact disc) are mainly those created by students to support their class work and sponsored projects.

The videotape cassettes, mainly student presentations, have been individually cataloged (VID0303–VID0335) and added to the Product Design video collection. There are many photographs, slides, and transparencies which have been removed to the photograph files. Most are slides of sponsored projects and student work.

The few administrative files consist mainly of lists of students in product design classes.

The sponsored projects (later known as Funded Educational Projects) files document product design projects from 1994 to 2003.

The student work files contain samples of sketches, product ideas and class projects.

The computer files (almost all of which are on compact disc) are mainly created by students to support their class work and sponsored projects.

The images in the Product Design Department photographs highlight the curriculum and student work, and also provide insight into American material culture. Although the student designs may not have ever been commercially produced, the designs nevertheless reflect general changes in the types of products being designed and sold in American markets after the end of World War II, and globally by the mid 1980s.

The collection contains many images of faculty giving critiques to classes of students, as well as advising individual students as they work on drawings or models. Students are documented as they work on all phases of their assignments, from drawings, to clay models, to plaster molds, to fabrication of the fully completed models. A fair number of images highlight students working outside, but most take place in model shops and in classrooms at the Third Street and Pasadena campuses. The product designs are wide ranging and include such items as kitchen appliances, clocks, parking meters, boats, and office equipment. John Coleman, Joseph Thompson, and Theodore Youngkin are the most often pictured faculty.

Sponsored projects make up a large number of images that document industry relationships with Art Center. The first sponsored project to be assigned to Art Center students by an outside company was the General Electric Space Capsule project in 1960. This well-documented project includes images of George Beck of GE assigning the project, student drawings, students working on the model, John Coleman advising students, and the final presentation to General Electric representatives.

Another well-documented sponsored project of note is the Catalina Project which the Industrial Designers Society of America assigned in 1961. The project was to create small water craft, and then present the designs to IDSA conference attendees. The images document five different solutions designed by groups of students, and show students working on their models from start to finish, faculty John Coleman and Joe Farrer working with the students, students testing their designs at Paradise Cove, and then the final presentations at Catalina Island.