BROOKLYN, N.Y., June 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Prominently featured in The Inner Circle, Forest Young is acknowledged as a Pinnacle Professional Member Inner Circle of Excellence for his contributions to Advancing Creative Leadership in a Changing Digital Landscape.
Forest Young is the founder of Young Studio, a design, storytelling and strategy practice serving new economy companies and select cultural projects. He is a Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art and Global Design and AI Resident at Wolff Olins. His career has moved between the world’s most significant design partnerships and the companies redefining their categories, placing him at the intersection of creative practice, business strategy, and emerging technology.
Mr. Young was raised between Cambridge, Massachusetts and points across the country, the son of a Dartmouth Reynolds Scholar who served under Vernon Jordan at the National Urban League, and an educator who contributed to MIT and Atari’s pioneering computing research alongside Cynthia Solomon and Margaret Minsky. By age five, he had self-published his first illustrated book series. By eighteen, he was a varsity football captain, AP Art scholar, and senior class president. He studied Human Development at Cornell University before choosing Yale’s MFA in Graphic Design over Juilliard’s theater program, a fork in the road decided when his chaise lounge design was exhibited at NeoCon alongside Vitra and Knoll.
At Yale, he studied under Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Karel Martens, Mevis & van Deursen and Irma Boom, alongside future MacArthur Fellows Tavares Strachan and Titus Kaphar. He was awarded the Mark Whistler Memorial Prize as the most inspirational member of his graduating class.
His professional record reads as a sequence of consequential commissions. At Interbrand, he led the design of Paper Prison for the Mandela 95 Initiative, honored with a Cannes Lion, an ADC Black Cube, a One Show Gold Pencil, and an AIGA Case. He was recruited by Allison Johnson, Apple’s former Global Marketing Officer, to help build the consultancy West, working with founders including Jack Dorsey, Sean Parker, and Patrick Brown. At Wolff Olins, he rose from Head of Design to become the first and only Chief Creative Officer in the firm’s sixty-year history. He led the Uber brand transformation, a 10-month global engagement launched in September 2018 that repositioned the company during a critical pre-IPO inflection point. The engagement spanned a period in which Uber’s proposed valuation reached as high as $120 billion, nearly double its prior private valuation, and it became the largest account across all Wolff Olins offices, contributing to the firm’s recognition by Fast Company as the World’s Most Innovative for Design.
In 2021, Mr. Young joined Rivian as Global Head of Brand, leading a 172-person organization and reported directly to CEO R.J. Scaringe. He led the brand narrative and NASDAQ Times Square activation for Rivian’s $11.9 billion IPO, the sixth-largest in the history of U.S. stock exchanges. In 2025, he returned to Wolff Olins as Global Design and AI Resident, where he is examining the relationship between authorship, automation, and the role of the designer in an era defined by generative systems.
Mr. Young’s work has been received across museums, juries, and cultural institutions. He has been nominated for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award, named to the Eames Institute’s Curious 100 (the institute’s annual index of the 100 thinkers, makers, and practitioners shaping how curiosity is applied to the world), and invited by Paola Antonelli into MoMA’s landmark exhibition Talk to Me. His collaboration with MacArthur Fellow Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts on Redaction at MoMA PS1 produced an open-source typeface and a catalog published by Gagosian. His work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Royal College of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Young Studio, which he has owned and operated since 2000, runs a value-priced talent guild model and is simultaneously white-labeled under the world’s most ambitious programs. He serves as fractional Chief Brand Officer at the cybersecurity firm Mimecast. He has taught at Yale for over a decade and previously created the first Future Design course at California College of the Arts. He is a contributing author to The Black Experience in Design and Willi Smith: Street Couture, and his work is featured in Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest. He has written for Fast Company, Source Type, TechCrunch, and Creative Review.
He is a founding advisor to MillerKnoll’s Diversity in Design Collaborative and previously served on the Board of Directors of AIGA NY. His current focus is the mentorship of younger designers in a time of unprecedented change. He teaches meditation. His line: Design is a desire path.
Contact:
Katherine Green
516-825-5634
editorialteam@continentalwhoswho.com
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SOURCE The Inner Circle
