One of the biggest priorities for Garson Yu, creative director and president of yU+co., is maintaining a “personal, boutique feel” in his design studio. It just so happens that his design studio also has seven offices worldwide, a handful of Emmy nominations and has worked with the likes of Tony Scott, John Woo and Ang Lee.

Since its creation in the late ‘90s, yU+co. has been the creative force behind several of this year’s biggest main title design projects, but that’s not where the shop’s talent stops. It has also worked with some of the most influential film franchises, retailers, car brands and video games in the past few decades, even working on the opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

But to Yu, design is a very personal and collaborative experience, and he stresses that focusing on the journey and the story is always much more valuable to him than the end result alone.

“To me, the philosophy of the company is that the process is as important as the product,” he said. “I think that it is important that the process is smooth and joyful to work together, and that everyone shares the same kind of belief in doing great work. That’s how we will be able to keep good relationships with filmmakers and clients, because if the process is stressful, it doesn’t matter if the end product is good if no one enjoyed it and no one wants to do it again.”

“One thing about us is that we feel like a very boutique operation. It’s important for me to keep it a boutique culture because we can give more attention to the project, rather than as a factory generating a lot of different work for the business’ sake.”

Yu is one of a long list of alumni from R/Greenberg Associates, the agency that became a training ground to many contemporary designers, including the team behind Imaginary Forces. Yu worked on end titles for years at R/GA, using his graphic design background from Yale, which is also where he met and began working with Kyle Cooper. When Imaginary Forces became an offshoot of R/GA, Yu went with the team to California, and shortly after decided to open his own studio.

At Imaginary Forces, Yu had worked with filmmaker Tony Scott on a film called The Fan, which led to his first project on his own, when he and yU+co. created the opening title sequence for his next movie, Enemy of the State. Within the next two years, his associate Carol Wong launched yU+co.’s commercial and broadcast divisions, putting the studio on the map. Since then, Yu’s film titles include Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Ridley Scott’s A Good Year, Memoirs of a Geisha, Green Lantern, Enchanted and Life of Pi.

In 2001, yU+co. won its first broadcast pitch and refreshed the look of CNN, which led to its first main titles for TV: Desperate Housewives, which gave the studio its first Emmy nomination and led to a recommendation to create the main titles for Ugly Betty. The Desperate Housewives show open was a big move for them and for broadcast main titles in general, according to Yu, using iconic imagery and historical references to show how women have shown their frustration and “chafed under their marital status.”

“These projects kind of put us on the map at that time,” said Yu. “That nomination gave us encouragement. Doing TV titles was actually pretty interesting because it’s such a different mindset – when we design film titles, we have much longer screen time to tell the story, but for TV titles, we only have 30 seconds, maybe 45 at most. Most of the major networks don’t want to have a long title sequence – it was exceptional for Desperate Housewives at that time to have 45 seconds.”

This was right around the time when Yu met filmmaker Ang Lee. YU+co. pitched for the Hulk main titles, which started a professional relationship that has grown since then. Yu’s team has created every opening sequence for Lee’s films ever since. Their decade-long friendship led to one of Yu’s biggest challenges to date, working on the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

“I enjoy working with filmmakers, and television clients too, because we start to build a really good relationship,” said Yu. “I just feel that, in a way, I am a doctor or a mechanic, and when someone needs something fixed, then I’m there. But then it will be a year or two and I will not see that patient. I won’t see my client until their next project or until they need more help. That’s the kind of career that we choose to have in entertainment, I think, and I really enjoy the relationships I’ve forged so far.”

So when Yu began working with the Beijing Gehua Cultural Development Group and the Olympics Committee, he approached his collaborator Lee about joining the project, forming a creative team that also included Olympics producer Don Misher and architect Maya Lin in order to pitch concept for the ceremonies in Beijing.

“I realized that they needed a creative partner who understood Chinese culture at that time,” said Yu. “There was a missing link in the creative conversations. So I thought of Ang, and I approached him and sent him the outlines of where we were at that time for the creative concept. He really loved the direction of it and he agreed to be onboard. So we developed all the initial concepts for the Olympics and then later on we passed the entire idea onto Zhang Yimou to direct the ceremony.”

A few very big things came out of that experience. Yu’s brother Roland helped the company to expand the studio’s operation abroad, including working on a traveling exhibit for the megabrand, Hello Kitty, and later opening a total of six yU+co. offices throughout China, along with yU+co.[lab], the digital integrated media design division of the home studio.

Back in the states, yU+co.started forming long-lasting relationships with some influential TV brands. One of these brands, AMC’s The Walking Dead, is one of the biggest shows on television. The network approached yU+co. after the first season, wanting to refresh the main titles, and the studio has created each season’s opening titles for the four seasons since, including season five, which premiered last month:

Each year’s opening sequences hint at the location for each season. Certain storylines for The Walking Dead focus on the group being at one or two locales for the majority of that season, so yU+co. played up that scenery, whether it was a prison, a farmhouse or in the middle of the woods, alongside personal mementos. Then they combined those scenes so that they’re seen from the point of view of an unknown walker as they make their way through the group’s movements season by season, reminding viewers where they have been and hinting at where they could go next.

“We took the idea of using still images and updated it,” said Yu. “We brought the still photographs to life, and we juxtaposed the idea of zombie visions with the characters, specific objects and locations that become a structure for the story. There are a lot of visual effects and manipulations with those still images. They’re very subtle, but the subtlety is what gives those details to the audience to discover every time when they see the opening sequence.”

Similar in visual but very different in content, the studio also recently created the main titles for Key and Peele on Comedy Central.

According to Yu, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele wanted to change things up for their fourth season, aiming for an opening with a higher production value that emphasized the duo’s dark humor and the many personalities both comedians emulate on their show.

“Jordan and Keegan had the idea that they wanted to create an over-the-top, high-end opening to make as a comedic statement,” said Yu, “so we came up with this idea of trying to parody what at that time was so popular and so hot, the True Detective main titles.”

Even the song is a loving parody of True Detective, sung by Jordan Peele himself.

“We have been lucky with all of our clients,” said Yu. “It’s so important to have fun with clients, because TV productions are so stressful already, so the fun part can be working on something together that everyone enjoys doing. Jordan and Keegan were very hands on and very involved directly with the project because they are the soul of the show.”

HBO also became a popular return client in the past few years. YU+co. has created, in the past year alone, the main titles for the miniseries Olive Kitteridge, Damon Lindelof’s drama The Leftovers and Mike Judge’s hit comedy Silicon Valley.

“For television title work, I think sometimes it’s important to identify and define cliché, so that everyone will be able to notice and connect with it,” said Yu. “For Silicon Valley, I chose a different look, more like a pixel art. Pixel art is familiar to people who see Facebook games like Farmville. It’s all very robotic and geometric shapes, and I think that to me, everything becomes a formula and you put it together, piece by piece. I thought that if we can use that technique and become a very distinctive look that will be a really good branding device for the show, unique and different.”

Yu adds that he was inspired by Judge’s background in animation (with Beavis and Butthead, among other shows) to create an animated open for an HBO comedy, something he hasn’t seen often before.

The studio’s main titles for Olive Kitteridge are quietly beautiful, filled with scenery and sweeping landscapes shown next to small moments at home, of signs, pills and the tiniest stitches. The Leftovers project takes on a heavier and more spiritual tone, inspired by Renaissance art. Each fresco comes to life at the moment where loved ones are separated by the rapture-like event that shapes the show’s story. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, represented much lighter fare.

“I think doing a comedic opening is harder than to do a dramatic opening in some ways,” said Yu. “Anyone can do a dramatic, cool and contemporary opening, and there are people doing it really well right now, but to have a comedic opening that’s effective, to me, is a little more challenging.”

Silicon Valley’s main titles, which were also nominated for an Emmy this year, are a hurried, tech-inspired animated sequence meant to reflect the fast-paced life of those in the real Silicon Valley. If one looks closely enough, the opening shows certain startups, like the main character’s, open, expand, collapse and get replaced, all in 11 seconds.

And as Yu’s company has moved from film to TV to experiential and back again, he says that the journey is almost as exciting as each individual project. Watching each medium evolve, according to Yu, is one of the most fascinating parts of his business – big-budget films passing over long opening credits in favor of end-title sequences, TV main titles getting shorter and shorter because of the DVR and viewers’ waning patience. He says that these changes are actually making the products more and more creative, and often more important, because of such limitations.

“When I look back to where we started, largely as a film title design company, designing the opening is setting up the tone of the movie, setting up an expectation,” said Yu. “When we apply the same principle and philosophy to other projects, it’s the same thing – we just needed to set up the tone and expectation and I think that can apply to a lot of things creatively.”

And those other projects he speaks of are no small feat, though they will still get yU+co.’s personal touch.

Next up for Yu include some of the biggest films of the next year: Main titles for Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken and next month’s live-action Disney movie, Into the Woods.

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