Doug Forbes
I design how brand is felt across the places people experience it.
Member Since
May 2026
I’m a brand strategist and graphic designer with twenty-five years of practice across identity, visual systems and the built environment. I work at the seam between the project as it’s imagined and the project as it’s built. My studio, Hiarki, is organized around the discipline of experiential brand design, built on a single position: brand lives in the audience’s experience, which makes identity and the built environment one continuous problem. The questions that govern a wordmark also govern a wayfinding system, an interior or an arrival sequence.
Ask me about
How brand and the built environment can be designed as one continuous problem instead of two separate disciplines.
My super power is
Figuring it out. Nobody handed me a path into this field (my dad was a chemist, my mom was a teacher’s aide). So I learned to build the staircase as I climb it. Twenty-five years in, that’s still how I work. I don’t wait to be shown the way, I find it.
I'm looking for
Fabrication partners who sweat the details, architects and designers who think across disciplines and conversations with people who treat experiential design as a craft rather than a deliverable.
What I love about experience design
[What I love about the work] The moment a brand stops being a logo on a page and becomes something people move through. A brand symbol becomes a wall, a position becomes an arrival. That translation, from flat to felt, is the whole reason I do this.
Best piece of advice I've ever heard
A friend of mine grew up with nothing and had a gift for walking into rooms where he wasn’t expected and being taken seriously. Galleries, high-end events, rooms full of people who should have intimidated him. I asked him once how he stayed so confident. He said, ‘I’m not confident, I’m just having fun.’ I don’t have better words for it, but I still apply his answer as advice every day.
Where I find Inspiration
I’m a high functioning introvert, so inspiration comes from the quiet I carve out to refill. Weekend mornings, oil painting with jazz on while my son paints miniatures beside me. 6am at the coffee shop the moment it opens, working through my thoughts in a journal before the day starts. And my developing library of design, architecture and theory books I return to whenever I need ideas, strategy or a way forward.
Practice Area
Branded Environments, Digital Experiences, Placemaking, Public Installation, Strategy/Research/Planning, Wayfinding
Focus Area
Brand, Destination Experiences, Digital, Graphic, Interactive, Interpretive, Signage
Industry
Corporate, Cultural, Education, Healthcare, Museums, Recreation, Retail, Sports, Urban + Civic, Visitor Centers, Workplace