As a designer, director and a founding member of Hollywood and New York-based design and entertainment firm Imaginary Forces, Karin Fong has been the creative energy behind some of the past decade’s best screen experiences.
Fong has been designing for as long as she can remember, though it was only at Yale University where she actively began studying “graphic design”. She’s wowed big and small screen audiences around the world with her designs for projects, ranging from live-action direction to experience design, environmental installation, stop-motion animation and title-sequences for feature films, among countless others.
Features films infused with Fong’s design dynamism include Ray, The Truman Show, Charlotte’s Web, Dead Man on Campus, The Pink Panther 2 and Terminator Salvation. She also counts Honda, Microsoft, Target and Herman Miller among her clients. Fong recently created a series of cinematics for the Sony Playstation game God of War III. Other projects include combining cinema with architecture for environments including Las Vegas, Times Square and Lincoln Center.
When Fong is not bringing imaginary forces to creativity she is:
- An Emmy Award winner for main title design.
- A D&AD award winner.
- A television commercial director.
- A one-time high school cheerleader who found it fun to make posters for the football players to blast through.
- Represented in the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Wexner Center, Artists Space in New York, and the Pasadena Museum of California Art.
- Currently on the faculty of the Yale School of Art, where she teaches design for film and video.
- Cites concrete poetry, and the work of the Dadaists and Surrealists as inspiration.
- One of those heroes is Joan Ganz Cooney, the original producer of Sesame Street.
- Encourages undergraduate students to try lots of different creative directions.
Karin Fong will be speaking at the 2011 Design Indaba Conference from 23 to 25 February.
Imaginary Forces - Karin Fong - Montage from Imaginary Forces on Vimeo.
