Yolanda Santosa and her new venture, Ferroconcrete, is creating a strong foundation for growing brands.

Yolanda Santosa recently appeared on the January cover of GDUSA, as one of 48 People to Watch in 2008. Previously an art director at yU+Co creating broadcast and movie titles for 300, Desperate Housewives, Catwoman and others, Santosa took what she learned from motion design and started Ferroconcrete to do branding. She feels that similar to motion, solutions to brands have to be fun, and entertaining. Brands have to be a sequence of progression.

Ferroconcrete does the design and brand development for the frozen dessert restaurant and cultural phenomenon, Pinkberry. When the company started with one store in West Hollywood (they now have 36 stores), Santosa has helped Pinkberry with all aspects of their brand, including coming up with their tag line "Swirly Goodness," concepts for events, design collateral, packaging, environment graphics, and Web site. Santosa says part of Pinkberry's success is due to concentrating not only on the product, but the interior space as well as the brand, and they have managed to separate themselves from the other emerging frozen yogurt brands. "Pinkberry's distinct flavor plus interior plus brand makes Pinkberry, Pinkberry. And copycats may replicate one aspect of the three, but never all three," she states.

Young Lee, Co-President at Pinkberry is a great client who pushes her to do great work. They have a great creative relationship and always shoot ideas to each other. "An instance is the Pinkberry Coffee Flavor Launch. I came up with initial design directions. He liked it, but felt it needed to be dramatic, 'like those main titles you do.' He suggested some kind of transformation going from coffee to yogurt. One idea was to have the yogurt emerging from a cup of coffee. I thought this was going to be 'Photoshop-Hell.' But once I started to open up to the idea of transformation, it became fun blending coffee, pouring to create a cup of yogurt, and I loved it. It was simple, concise and had a dramatic impact that blended well with Pinkberry's brand."

Santosa tends to go for simple solutions and simple executions. She loves to strip an idea down to the bare minimum. Of course, most things ended up not as bare as she'd like it to be. Her admiration for architect Tadao Ando inspired her design philosophy. Concrete is beautiful. Design is about minimalism and light and loving things as they are.

Rachel Elnar is editor-in-chief of the AIGA/LA website.