Jayson Won

Born: Oct. 17, 1969 (29)

Co-Founder, Creative Director

1K Studios

Jayson Won started out as a drummer in a local hard-rock band, but it didn’t pan out quite as well as he had hoped.

Fortunately for Won, he had design skills to fall back on. Now, at the age of 29, he’s the co-founder and creative director for a leading design boutique that specializes in DVDs.

Just starting its second year of business, IK Studios boasts seven of the nine major movie distributors as clients. Won and his artists design graphics for the bonus goodies that are jammed onto DVD movies, such as the menus, art, animation and interactive information. In the early days of the home movie technology, Won estimates that he personally designed 80 percent of all studio-released DVDs. As more competition crops up, his market share is down to about 15 percent, but he remains a pioneer in the now-booming field.

Won, who along with his parents emigrated from Seoul in 1977, studied art at Torrance High School, where he attended a concurrent graphic design program run by the Southern California Regional Occupational Center. Although he and his band steadily played the L.A. club circuit in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Won always knew that art was his backup plan.

After working at a couple of different design firms, he landed a job at broadcast design company Aerodrome Pictures. There, his work with a creative director won two Emmys for graphic and art direction for NBC’s graphics package for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

In mid-1996, Won moved to Novocom Inc. as an art director and senior designer. While there, Won was called in by Panasonic to consult on a new technology called DVD. He was hired to design the graphics for some of the first DVDs on the market, including Universal’s hit, “Babe.” Other studios took note of his work.

While at Novocom, Won had also met producer and future 1K partner Matthew Kennedy. Won and Kennedy realized that they were on to something, and the two poured their respective life savings into founding 1K.

“The future is interactive,” Won said. “My dream is to build this company into a major design firm that excels in a variety of areas.”

Sara Fisher