Responses by Karin Fong, creative director, Imaginary Forces.
Background: For the Apple TV+ series Imperfect Women, the goal of the main titles was to draw viewers into a web of intimacy, rivalry and betrayal between three longtime friends, played by Kate Mara, Elisabeth Moss and Kerry Washington. We wanted the sequence to tap into the unspoken conflicts without being literal, so we built a visual world out of fractured ceramics, hinting at broken bonds, layered histories and the mystery beneath the surface.
Design thinking: The title of Imperfect Women already has a built-in tension—between what’s presented on the surface and what’s actually going on underneath. Showrunner Annie Weisman described the story as deeply intertwined lives shaped by secrets and betrayals. As we explored the concept of rupture and repair, kintsugi—the Japanese art of mending pottery with gold—became a perfect metaphor. What makes kintsugi so compelling is that the method doesn’t hide the damage—it highlights and changes it. That idea really became the foundation of the design.
Challenges: We were essentially building a ceramic collage out of landscapes, faces and textures, while trying to make it all feel like one cohesive world. The big parts of that challenge were working in a space that straddled 2-D and 3-D and developing a style that was graphic but simultaneously tactile and dimensional.
Honestly, making good-looking cracks is weirdly difficult. As animator Henry Chang puts it: “[The cracks] had to look like they randomly occurred but also feel visually pleasing. We ended up studying quite a bit of photographic reference. Making them feel real and attractive might have been the most unforeseen part of the puzzle.”
Favorite details: When Scott Bell, our lead Houdini artist, showed us an early test of the animated gold, everyone just oohed and realized this concept was going to work. It was incredibly satisfying to see the rivulets of gold we had imagined in the storyboards actually come to life. Scott honed the behavior down to the minutiae—the way the gold briefly pools, then hardens within the cracks—giving it a heightened sense of realism. There’s also a moment where our editor, Lexi Gunvaldson, uses the music to subtly underscore its first appearance. We’re basically watching paint dry, and it works.
Visual influences: Kintsugi was the conceptual backbone, but Los Angeles was just as important. The show is set here, it was shot here and our studio is based here. We wanted to create a portrait of the city that not only felt true to the story but also to us as Angelenos. You’ll catch glimpses of the Downtown Los Angeles skyline, the Colorado Street Bridge, the Griffith Observatory, and hints of the city’s distinct hills and coastline. What’s fun is how those landscapes juxtapose with cropped figures and faces to create something surreal and suggestive. For instance, designer Jeffrey Su created a moment that reads like an aerial shot of cliffs and ocean—but then you realize the curves are actually a body.
And of course, Los Angeles is a city built on fault lines. The sense that this whole world could shift and fracture adds another layer of meaning.
New lessons: One of the best parts of these projects is getting to really dive into the material. We learned a lot about various kinds of ceramics, the different clays and glazes, and concepts like “crazing”—fine cracks that form on the surface of ceramics after firing. We also looked at bas-relief as a way to give the figures a bit of sculptural form while still keeping things flat and graphic.
Additionally, we dug into the specifics of kintsugi—it’s a slow, meticulous process involving resin and gold powder, which is quite different from how we interpreted it. However, understanding the real craft helps you make more intentional choices in how you abstract it.
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