Published on Monday, January 4th, 2010 by Stuart Thursby

This obituary is re-published in full from the Globe and Mail’s website. CDOT (Communication Designers of Toronto) is helping plan an honorary event in 2010; please contact Errol Saldanha if you wish to be involved with it. A reprint of an article written about Don in our Jan/Feb 2008 issue follows the obituary.

Update: Some other pieces on Don Watt: Marketing Magazine, Design Edge, CDOT (first news item), Marketing Hall of Legends, the Toronto Star

DON WATT 1936 – 2009

Don passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on Wednesday December 23, 2009 at age 73. Totally loved husband of Patricia (nee Martin). Dear father of Peggy (Adam), Greg (Beth), Laura (Craig), Sarah, and stepson Robert. Proud grandfather of Katie, Jennifer, David and Lauren. Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Don attended Luther College there, and moved to Toronto in the mid-1950′s to attend the Ontario College of Art. He was predeceased by Patricia Watt (nee Williams) and is survived by his first wife Val Mund.

Recognized as an icon in his industry, Don worked with major retailers all over the world. He developed brands that today are still current, and store designs that remain some of the world’s most recognizable. The list is very long and includes the following – redesign of the Loblaws stores, No Name and President’s Choice; Wal-Mart Super Centres, Great Value and Sam’s Choice; Home Depot with its distinctive orange logo and innovative store concept; and more recently the new Metro stores and packaging. While working for Nestle, Don was the first designer to use photo-symbolism on packaging for their instant coffee. He was recognized by the Harvard School of Business and was recently inducted into the Private Label Hall of Fame and into Canada’s Marketing Hall of Legends.

During Don’s early career he worked as an animator for Warner Brothers. He then took a job at an advertising agency, where they asked him to design a cigarette package that would appeal to younger people. He pondered it for a few days and then quit, saying it did not feel right. This should tell you heaps about the man and his principles. He often said, ‘just ask yourself what is the right thing to do and you won’t go wrong.’ He worked as a designer for A.V. Roe, working on the cockpit design for the Avro Arrow airplane, and he also worked on the design of the Canada Pavillion at Expo ’67.

One of Don’s proudest achievements occurred in 1965 when his design was personally chosen by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson for the new Canadian Flag. Don’s design, featured a realistic representation of a red maple leaf, flanked by two solid blue bands representing ‘from sea to sea’. Pearson changed the blue bands to red, saying to Don, ‘this is a Liberal flag’. Don’s design, until recently, was credited to a design committee. However, it is now recognized as his work, by leading International and Canadian news and design publications.

Don was a visionary with a brilliant mind. He changed how people shopped around the world. He could have lived and worked anywhere in the world, but he preferred to stay in Canada, a country he loved and often said, where he preferred to have his children raised. He was a man who was the epitome of being comfortable in his own skin. He was genuine. He was kind, and he had the most wonderful sense of humour. His feet were firmly planted on the ground and he always had lots of time for everyone, no matter their walk in life.

Don was a generous man and a supporter of many charities. However the closest to his heart was the Clarke Institute. He recognized that mental health was an area where it was more difficult to raise money. He was instrumental in raising the $17 Million needed to purchase their first P.E.T. machine allowing doctors to more accurately diagnose disorders of the brain. He also helped bring the Courage to Come Back Dinner to Toronto, still one of CAMH’s most successful fundraising events today. The Clarke merged with the Queen Street Mental Health Centre in 1998 to become CAMH. He was unselfish with his time and sat on many boards, giving them the advantage of his vast wealth of retail knowledge.

Words cannot express how deeply he will be missed by his family, his long time business partner Geoff Belchetz at DW+Partners, and by the many people whose lives he touched. A private family service and burial will take place at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. A memorial service and celebration of Don’s wonderful life is planned for a later date. The family graciously declines flowers, but donations may be made to the CAMH Research Centre at http://www.supportcamh.ca/donations.asp A Book of Condolences is available at www.etouch.ca where you can leave a message for the family.

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In the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Applied Arts, Errol wrote a piece on Canadian Design icons. Naturally, Don Watt was amongst those written about, and the following is reprinted from that issue followed by several images of Don’s work. The images accompanied the article.

Before branding there was Don Watt, a man who defies classification. Born in Regina, he graduated from the Ontario College of Art in industrial design in 1957. He then worked as an illustrator, an animator and an agency creative director before founding Watt + Associates, in 1966, and turning his predilection for 3-D design into package work.

But rather than just design packages, he started designing whole brands. Watt’s successful work revamping the packaging for Nestlé’s Nescafé instant coffee had him travelling to Europe on behalf of Nestlé to work on its brands in various markets. There he discovered what “stood out on the shelves.” “Back then, people didn’t regard retail packages as being important,” Watt recalls. “They regarded the commercial as everything. But the television wasn’t playing when you went in the stores. So what I wanted was to bring the emotion that you could get on television right into the store, by putting it on the package.”

Watt was able to put this learning into practice when he made an unsolicited approach to the owner of Loblaws in 1973, and received what could only be called a sweeping mandate. Not only did Watt begin his revolutionary practice of putting fresh food images on packages, he redesigned the interiors and exteriors of stores, recommended ad agencies, worked to help develop in-house brands, created in-store signage, introduced TV screens in stores, so that president Dave Nichol could talk directly to customers, and did much more than can be listed here, helping to turn the company’s fortunes around.

Asked how he could secure such a wide-ranging role for himself, Watt responds: “All disciplines tend to create silos for themselves. People say I am a package designer, a promotional designer, a graphic designer, and so on. I always told myself that I don’t have those barriers in my head. Why should I let anyone put them there? I learned very early that if I talked about design for design’s sake, nobody would listen. But they would listen if you could show how design affected the profitability or performance of a product or service.”

After selling the Watt Group in 1999 to Envoy Communications, he founded DW+Partners, in 2003, as a consultancy specializing in retail branding and design. With his new business growing, Watt is still faced with the old problem of describing to people what he does: “If someone asks, I say that I am a problem solver. I don’t care what the problem is—I’ll tackle anything that affects the consumer and the consumer’s perception of the business.”

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