Design courses are evidently too practical for a place like Oberlin (where I was an English major and also studied art and photography), so I had to learn the particulars of graphic design on the fly. Fortunately, I could apprentice myself to the design and publications staff at the Cleveland Museum of Art. They were good teachers and I was promoted to the newly created position of assistant director of creative services in 2008, overseeing the museum’s brand expression, and in that role led a project to update the museum’s graphic identity and developed the museum’s first comprehensive brand guide. Our team presented numerous AIGA workshops and sat on panels for the Cleveland chapter of that national design organization. For many years, we all volunteered to serve at the AIGA’s annual portfolio review day, offering feedback to up-and-coming designers. I concluded my career at the Cleveland Museum of Art in April 2021 after more than 30 years at the museum.
In the late 1990s, partly in the search for a more substantial means of understanding how the museum served its public than the self-validating strategies of marketing could provide, I went to graduate school for urban planning and design and earned a Master of Science degree with a focus on design and aesthetic experience, through the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University—I have never used the degree in any directly professional way, but the things I learned along the way have enriched the full range of my activity.
Outside of my museum work, I co-founded and designed the award-winning Heights Observer community newspaper in 2008; the design template is still in use today by its current design team. I have designed a few logos and identity systems including, most notably, that of Heights Arts.
My recent freelance design and editorial client list includes ARTneo, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Orchestra, Heights Arts, the Heights Observer, Ital Cycling, Don Julien for Foothill Galleries, Thomas Morris, R-Eval, and the United Way of Greater Cleveland.
Working for an art museum must be one of the best jobs a designer can have, because most of the visual material has already been pre-selected as world-class artistic production worthy of being in a place like the Cleveland Museum of Art. It would be a privilege to design one issue of a museum magazine; I designed a couple hundred of them, most cover-to-cover. It's almost embarassing: I got to design so many cool things over the years I stopped even saving samples.
Recent freelance work includes designing Always the Music, a book by Tom Morris about his life in music; Strange and Lonely Spaces, a book accompanying an exhibition about Magical Realist painting in Cleveland at ARTneo in Cleveland (2021); Roger Cram's book In the Hearts of Peaceful Heroes in which he profiles notable "heroes of peace" and examines their shared values (2022); a catalogue for the exhibition The Other Side of 8 at Foothill Galleries in Cleveland Heights (2022), and my own suite of books as part of my Miscagon publishing project. An interesting mid-2000s project was a suite of CD packages for recordings by organist Karel Paukert.
The Heights Arts logo has found its way into many applications. The organization (of which I was a founding board member and two-time president) covers visual, musical, and literary art forms, a situation that presents interesting design opportunities such as this book pairing poems and photographs inspired by the Coventry district in Cleveland Heights.
As chair of the Heights Arts Exhibition Community Team (earlier known as the Gallery Committee) for many years, I have worked on the planning, design, and installation of dozens of shows.
Contact: info@gmdonley.com