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In
the Herman Miller "Get Real" ad, the word "real" swerves from
line into word, then transforms into a road along which Charles and
Ray Eames speed on their motorcycle. It's a jazzy, kinetic tour
through the designers' furniture that stands as a testament to the
intelligent, compelling and conceptually integrated work of its
creator, Karin Fong. Where many designers working with typography
and motion delight in making things move, Fong invariably takes her
work a step further, melding thought and image into a figural whole
that has become her personal trademark.
Indeed, "smart" may be the best word to
describe work by Fong,
one of the founding members of Imaginary Forces and the designer
behind many of the last decade's standout feature-film title
treatments and ads. She likes ideas, concepts and storytelling;
they constitute the building blocks for her innovative work, which
includes the playful extension of the Dr. Seuss style in The Cat
in the Hat movie titles, as well as the line-drawn,
illustrated-storybook style of the titles for the 2006 film version
of Charlotte's Web. She likes the way an idea can take
shape, moving from the abstract to the tangible, and she especially
enjoys the way letters can become images, finding something magical
in that transformation. She cites concrete poetry at the turn of
the last century and the work of the Dadaists and Surrealists as
inspiration, as well as Saul Steinberg's drawings for The New
Yorker, where there's a playful straddling of the visual and
the verbal.
On
becoming a designer:
I always was a designer before I knew what to call it. I spent my
childhood making my own newspapers, books and comics that my dad
would take to work and "publish" for me on a Xerox machine.
Fong knew from an early age that she wanted
to be an artist. The
California native made elaborate comic strips with her brother, and
although she was a cheerleader in high school, she found it more
fun to make the posters that the football players would blast
through at the start of their games. She was constantly making
things as a kid, worked on her high school yearbook, and often
inveigled her teachers into letting her create artistic projects in
lieu of the standard five-paragraph essays. "I feel like I was a
graphic designer all my life but didn't know what it was until I
was in college," she says.
When she
arrived at Yale, Fong decided to major in art and
enrolled in a long list of art-related classes, including drawing,
photography, history, storyboarding and writing. Those courses
helped build a broad background, but she says that some of the most
influential training for her future design career happened through
the projects she undertook with friends. She designed The Yale
Record, the school's humor magazine, and made slide projections
for a theatrical production, projects that helped her hone a set of
conceptual skills that would allow her to move easily from project
to project and medium to medium—skills that are essential in an age
when the number of viewers' screens, and the sizes they come in, is
continually multiplying. One of her main regrets about college is
not that she failed to focus; on the contrary, Fong wishes that she
had taken a class in sculpture, which would have helped her
understand space more effectively, and screenwriting, since so much
of what she does now centers on narrative and ad copy.
Understanding the writing process, she says, has become absolutely
central to everything she does.
While
many educators urge undergraduates to pick a specific area
of focus, when Fong talks to students, she does the opposite, using
her own varied background to encourage them to try lots of
different directions, claiming that she couldn't have known what
she wanted to do as a freshman or sophomore in college. It was only
after she'd tried multiple approaches, materials and disciplines
that she began to see how graphic design in general, and an
attention to ideas-made-concrete in particular, was where her
passion was strongest.
On
her first job:
It was sink or swim and I was gasping for breath, taking home the
manuals, learning how to light and compose a frame, design
storyboards—all the things that lead to directing both live action
and animation.
Fong also
attributes her interest in the fusion of design and
ideas to the people she considers her heroes. One of those heroes
is Joan Ganz Cooney, who founded the Children's Television Workshop
in 1968, which in turn produced Sesame Street, pushing
television as a medium in a new direction, with a social purpose.
Fong is struck by the fact that Cooney took a powerful idea and
made it real, transforming a cultural institution in the process.
Similarly, Sheila de Bretteville, an artist and designer who joined
the Yale faculty in 1990 as director of graduate studies in graphic
design, resonates powerfully for the ways in which she advocated
for the voice of designers. De Bretteville denounced the manner in
which designers are subsumed by their clients, and argued instead
that student designers should adopt a strong attitude and clear
point of view in their work.
Fong
embraced this idea after she graduated from Yale in 1994.
She worked on a season of Where in the World Is Carmen
Sandiego? at WGBH in Boston, using an interactive alphabet book
that she'd made as her senior thesis at Yale as a calling card to
get the job. Her next stint was at R/Greenberg Associates, quickly
picking up skills in the newly available Photoshop and Illustrator
programs along the way and working with Kyle Cooper, whose level of
dedication inspired a similarly focused attention in Fong. Although
the transition to the computer—both for Fong and the industry as a
whole—would radically shift the graphic design industry, Fong still
insists on keeping one foot firmly planted in the material world,
often working by hand before moving her work into the digital
realm.
In her current work, writing
well has become increasingly
central. "I think it's so important to have basic skills, just so
you can articulate an idea," says Fong. "But I really wish right
now that I could write dialogue. There's a way of triangulating
from the page to the screen, and the more fluid you are with that
transition, the better."
Her
advice to new graduates:
Find projects and people who inspire you. Don't rush. Early work
has a role in defining what you do next. Also, learn to type—and
check your spelling, especially people's names.
Fong's personal work returns to her primary
passion, namely the
tension between word, concept and image. One of her ongoing
projects is a collection of words that have no translation in
English, such as the German schadenfreude, which refers to
the delight one takes in the misfortunes of others. Fong takes
pleasure in the rift that opens between the word (which does not
exist in English) and the feeling—which we all can identify with.
She plays in the boundary space between concept and language,
finding ways to give the ideas some form, whether in illustrated
flashcards or comic-book characters. In 2002, she collaborated with
Ayse Birsel on Wunderkammer: A Cabinet of Words, an
installation that collected and displayed some of these words in
illustrative ways at Artists Space in New York City.
Fong's work resonates strongly because it is
at once situated in
pop culture and advertising and yet feels smart and playful. Rather
than being dismissive or condescending toward commercial work, Fong
borrows the impulse for wordplay from artists and designers of the
past and manifests it in a long list of her own compelling
projects, which so often thrive on wit and the visual/verbal twist.
"I envy people who have beautiful form, who are more formal, but I
think the way I work is more concept-based," Fong explains. "I
think equally in words and visuals, and I like to push the idea of
playing, especially playing in way where there's an element of
surprise as something gets turned on its head."
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