Tran's Vision

Founded by a designer - architect couple Tam Tran and Michael LaForte, TRANSFORMATION provides transdisciplinary, transitional, transactive, and highly transformative work and services to our clients. We strive to transfuse companies, businesses, and people's lives with visionary design solutions. The firm focuses on Residential and Retail Interior Designs, Home Staging, Exhibition/Display Design, 3D Visualizations, Graphic Design, Corporate Branding services.

We begin every project with a transparent, thorough, and investigative research to fully understand our clients and their unique business practice and/or domestic interests. This phase may be as transitory or exhaustive as is required of the project. This enables us to transpose preconceptions and concepts fluidly and transmit compelling, evocative designs today, which will be relevant tomorrow.

As we transverse media platforms, we are continually researching current technologies and trends,
and transfer our discoveries into meaningful client-based transcriptions. We employ a highly conscious approach to the environment and not only propose the most effective solutions for our clients, but also maintain as minimal trangression as possible in the design and development process.

We conceive of transistors for providing our clients with transitive views, thoughtful and exceptionally personalized service, providing guidance and suggestions in intimate collaboration with our clients to add value to their vision. Our transom of clients include architecture firms, residential clients, public galleries, transportation projects, and services for non-profit organizations.

While some projects such as temporary exhibitions, pop-up stores or media campaigns are transient in nature, passing through our conscience measurable in days, weeks, and months, we strive to make an indelible impression. Other programs have longevity by nature, to which we strive for our actions and
choices to transfer timeless virtues. As our name suggests, we embrace opportunities to use transparency and translucency to instill tranquillity, transcendent, and transgressive experiences.

Stay tuned for future Transmissions!

Our Leadership

Tam Tran

Partner and Principal of Interiors

Graduated in 2014 from California State University, Long Beach in BA in Designs, Tam Tran is an experienced and passionate interior designer with over 4 years of design practice at architecture and design firms in Orange County, California. She has designed and involved in several projects of different scales from an architectural space of a commercial office, a cafeteria, a retail store, a residential home to a trade show exhibit, a display fixture and furniture. Among those projects are the ones for well-known brands including Mammoth Ski Resort, RVCA, Nixon, Sanuk, Ocean Eleven Casino, Bassman Blaines, Skin Laundry, Callaway, Randy's Donuts. Tran's design style reflects a clean, simple aesthetic yet elegant and cutting-edge with a touch of unexpected wow factors.

Collaborating with Michael LaForte, who shares with her passions in art and design, they founded Transformation to genuinely transforming the dreams and aspirations of their clients into reality.

Michael LaForte

Partner and Principal of Architecture and Communications

Michael's work combines sculptural investigation, architecture, and graphic design and has won design awards, been shown throughout the US, he has work in a number of private collections including the Norton Family Foundation Collection.

Michael began his design journey in his father's sign studio in high school and now has over 20 years of professional creative practice experience including design services and independent investigative works. He is Tran'sformation Design's creative director and resource principal of architecture, site works, and branding communications. His experimental approach rooted in best practices ensures our work is investigative, inventive, and meets our client's strategic initiatives.

He has led the marketing and graphic design studios at leading international architecture and design firms including Rafael Viñoly Architects, Perkins Eastman Architects, and Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects in New York City, prior to transplanting to Los Angeles. Working with multi-disciplinary teams, he has designed and directed thousands of compelling visual campaigns including presentations, proposal submissions for highly competitive international projects, brochure collateral, exhibitions and environmental graphics. His communications strategies and leadership has led to his firms winning over half a billion dollars in contracts.

He has designed private residences to corporate office towers and airports with Jones Studio Architects in Phoenix, Arizona, McIntosh Poris Architects in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and SOM in New York.

Having lived, studied, and worked throughout the United States and practiced with collaborative teams internationally, he has a uniquely diverse perspective on global practice and the human experience.

Michael a Lecturer in Design and Design Communications at California State University, inspiring students to create ground-breaking work. He is a regular guest critic at OTIS College of Art and Design, USC School of Architecture, and has been a visiting critic at Rhode Island School of Design, Pratt University, Rennselear Polytechnic Institute, SUNY Albany, and at the Universidad Blas Pasqual in Cordoba, Argentina.