Inside the Designer’s Workshop

One of the more unusual aspects of last spring’s Paint & Pixels exhibit at the University Museum was that it gave equal attention to both Ron Donoughe’s painting and Don Donoughe’s graphic design.

We are all accustomed to seeing paintings hanging on the walls of a museum. But seeing websites and logo designs displayed as works of art was a new experience for many museum visitors, even if much of what was on display was already familiar to museum visitors. Award-winning graphic designer—and IUP alumnus—Don Donoughe has done work for clients as diverse as Disney, Sprint, Intel, Robert Mondavi, Adobe, Sun Microsystems, Catholic Healthcare West, Safeway, Second Harvest Food Bank, and a number of universities. So even if you do not know his name, you have probably seen his work before.

By providing Don Donoughe’s drafts and planning documents along with the finished products, the exhibit made visible the intense work and thought that go into even the simplest graphic design. (In fact, it is often the simplest designs that require the most work to achieve.)

Below, Donoughe takes IUP Magazine on a virtual tour of his Silicon Valley studio, guiding us through four projects from start to finish, and giving us greater insight into the work of the designer.

Creating the Unexpected

When the Portland Wine Project approached Donoughe to create a graphic identity for its new facility, “they wanted to do something that wasn’t expected.” It was a tall order, given how creative the design of wine bottles and labels has been in recent years; the diversity of design is “pretty incredible,” noted Donoughe, “from the very modern to the very traditional.”

Click any image below to start a slide show showing how Donoughe has developed a unique graphic identity for the Portland Wine Project.

Donoughe’s construction company logo is even more iconic than the logo for the Portland Wine Project. Since the name of the company began with an H, Donoughe focused on that letter for designing the identity: “I thought long and hard about what is the simplest iconic way to project construction and building with a simple H.”

Click any image below to start a slide show showing how Donoughe developed a simple yet powerful graphic identity for a construction company.

An Online Harvest

The Second Harvest Food Bank provides food to low-income households in California’s Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. Donoughe notes that Second Harvest was “always one of my favorite charity organizations. They’re great people and do a lot of great work. We took on this project [in 2003] to help them go more upscale with the site and make it easier for people to donate online.”

More Compelling than Words and Images Alone

“We do a lot of work for Catholic Healthcare West, and one of the important pieces we do every year is their annual report.” Last year, the organization “decided to save money by doing a