A career graphic designer who claims to have been sidetracked into building a business, Glenn began in the major Toronto studios of the 1960s, becoming an Advertising Agency Art Director before beginning his own studio, Davis, in 1970.

During the last 35+ years, Glenn has emphasized branding as primarily expressed through packaging design to increase clients’ sales. Through the process of “image transference” it has been established that the package becomes the brand and thus is the leading influencer of registering an impression with consumers.

A modest entrepreneurial start-up studio in the basement of a house has grown to a multi-agency organization supporting clients primarily across North America. Despite sustained growth and reconfiguration, Glenn has always ensured that the quality of our work has consistently met client requirements, often going beyond to delight them, their customers and their consumers. This commitment has been self-renewing in that it gives rise to referrals to a broadening business base and attendant creative challenges.

As the business grew, other complementary concepts were developed and are enshrined in how we operate today.
  • The consumer was always the focal point of each project. Image Diagnostics™, a Spontaneous Response Monitor was developed from the pioneer psychological market research work of Louis Cheskin. This approach replicates the consumer’s shopping experience in an ideal manner for determining consumer expectations and preferences for each category of product or service.
  • Account teams were created to give the best possible service to clients long before the team concept was popularized.
  • Account Directors were given autonomy and authority to service clients in the way that best meets clients’ requirements.
  • Staff was reimbursed commensurate with talent, tenure and the success of the business.
Throughout this time, Glenn has worked with many talented strategic and creative staff in support of multinational, tier-one clients. Many of those staff have remained to work alongside new generations of designers and business graduates to support a long-tenured client base. In an industry denoted by turnover and change, Davis relies on continuity and service quality as a complement to passion for unsurpassed design excellence. 


Glenn embraces and reinforces the phrase “strategic design building brands” to capture his concept of how his studio would work. Designs are never “just pretty pictures” but always address an objective in a logical and “planful” manner. From the start, Glenn has sought “dramatic simplicity” in developing designs that were intrusive but also genuinely appealing to the target market. Recognizing that no one person or agency holds the patent on simplicity, it is instructive to observe what others are saying about this topic; for an expansion of the concept of simplicity, please see John Maeda’s website.