News

It’s our 25th anniversary!!

25 years ago, Donna Hughes (my mom) scooted up to the drawing table in her bedroom and started work on her first project as Hughes design|communications. It was a brochure, and the client was the father of a friend of mine down the street. I was 8 years old and only barely remember this beginning because in my childhood memories she was always sitting at a drawing table. She was a single mom and together the two of us had navigated her college years in Houston, grad school years in Basel, Switzerland, and then her first job as a designer. Now here we were, settled in a little house in Evanston, Illinois, and it was the beginning of what would become our family business. She did all design work by hand with colored pencils, markers, Plaka Black & White, ruling pens, T-squares, triangles and surgical knives. The administrative side of the business was run through my brand new Apple IIC desktop computer, a gift from my dad that I was using to teach myself DOS programming (and to play Lode Runner, of course). As her business grew and her client list got bigger and more prestigious, I hovered close by, happily writing programs on my computer, drawing with my mom’s colored pencils and markers, and sticking her Letraset rub-down type anywhere I could. You could say that I’ve worked (in some capacity) at Hughes design my whole life.

It’s amazing to fast-forward 25 years and see us now, working from our super-fast Macs and running a business that has managed to gracefully weather all the storms, economic and otherwise, of the last two-plus decades. After studying graphic design in college, I moved to San Francisco to pursue my interest in web design and worked in the dot-com industry and then started my own design firm after the bust. In 2003, my husband and I decided to move back to Chicago in search of lower housing costs and to be closer to friends and family, and my mom and I made the decision to merge our two businesses. And here we are! It’s worked out beautifully. We work together but separately. In addition to continuing to create amazing and communicative print pieces for our clients (with a leaning toward medical/science-oriented businesses and organizations) and ever-so-smoothly running the administrative end of things, my mom also is an Adjunct Professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Biomedical Visualization department. I work mainly with businesses specializing in fashion, beauty and lifestyle, and while I do a lot of print work and love it, the web is my domain—I’ve been creating and developing websites for the last 11 years. We truly love and are grateful for what we do.

In honor of the event of our 25th anniversary, my mom has created a beautiful new logo, which is actually a modernized version of the very first Hughes design logo (which was drawn by hand!). The basis of the imagery for both logos is the peacock feather, which symbolizes the beauty of communication. This is hugely important to us, as our sole purpose as designers is to create effective and creative communications for our clients. 

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Perfect, right?

We’d like to thank all of our clients, big and small and old and new, for being a part of Hughes design|communications, and for making it possible for us to do what we love with such success. 

-Courtney

1.6.10 Design Book in the Final Stages

I just got word that the design book, to be called Symbol and published by Laurence King Publishers, a small creative arts publisher, is in it’s final stages. We are so excited to see these logos in print, and so proud that they’ve been chosen. I’ll post again when the book actually publishes, but in the meantime, here are the three chosen logos…

-Courtney

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1.1.10 Happy New Year!

2009 was, despite the economy, a great year for us here at Hughes Design. We worked on many exciting projects with clients both new and old. Most of those projects are up, but we’ve got several that have just been completed that we’ll be posting as soon as the holiday dust settles. 2010 looks to be bringing us many more opportunities to do more of the work that we love with clients that we love. We couldn’t be more thankful. We’d like to wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year!

-Courtney

10.16.09 Logos to Be Published in Design Book

Earlier this week, we got an email from an image researcher at a book publisher letting us know that three of our logos have been selected to appear in a book on logo design, which is quite an honor. We’ll let you know more when the book is published!

-Courtney

10.12.09 New Fall Projects in the Hopper

It looks to be a busy Fall here at hughes design! We’ve just signed a handful of new clients and new projects and we’re very excited to be working on all of them. More details to come, but here is a snapshot:

  • a new report on current health care facts and trends
  • the design and development of an exclusive new members-only fashion website
  • a logo for a new company specializing in products that spark children’s imaginations
  • ads, promotional pieces, and an email newsletter for a solar cell distributor
  • and the refurbishing of an established scholarly publication in order to better address environmental health professionals’ current needs and challenges

9.01.09 New Site Launches

We’ve been planning on rebuilding the site for quite some time and up until recently there just hasn’t been the time. I started the initial layouts a year ago, but then got so busy I had to shelve the project in order to work on client projects. All the while, though, I was making plans for the architecture and functionality of the site. My goal was to take the site from a Flash site that was a pain to update and that also was not very user-friendly in terms of being able to bookmark pages and in terms of organization, to a very streamlined site run by a CMS (Content Management System). I am a majorly enthusiastic fan of content management systems, Expression Engine in particular, because they allow for incredibly easy site updates (even for those who know not a lick of HTML), and also because you can create a very robust, complex, yet exceptionally fast and scalable site using just a few template pages. Have I mentioned that I love content management systems?

The new site is exactly what I had aimed for—clean and simple and well-organized and a dream to update. The focus here is on the work, not on any distracting animation or unnecessary bells and whistles. Form follows function. I hope you like it as much as we do.

- Courtney