Doug Forbes is the personal practice of an artist, brand strategist, and graphic designer working across identity, visual systems, spatial experience, and fine art.
I began as a painter, built a career in graphic design, and found my way into brand strategy, marketing, storytelling, and the built environment. Across all of it, the work has remained the same at its core: turning instinct, memory, tension, and ambition into visible form.
This site is where those disciplines overlap. Paintings, essays, brand studies, visual experiments, and spatial ideas all live here as part of one larger inquiry: how feeling becomes structure, and how structure becomes something people can recognize, use, and remember.
Fair question. I like to make things that feel honest. That includes brands, spaces, paintings, strategy decks—whatever. I’m not trying to be clever. I’m not chasing awards. I just like to think a little deeper about the things most people skip past, and I work until it fits. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that taste shifts, trends rot, and buzzwords evaporate. But clarity? That stays. So I aim for that.
Most of what I do comes down to listening carefully, trusting instinct, and putting in the hours. That’s it. That’s the job. If that sounds useful to you, then we’re probably on the same page.
HIARKI DESIGN Co.
601 2ND ST SE
MPLS, MN 55414
(612) 361-7940
