Don was born and spent his earliest years in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Small town life informed his boyhood days in Parsons, Kansas, where his grandmother was the only art teacher for the entire school system (K-12 +Jr.College). The family moved when his father’s job took them to Belleville, Illinois, where high school years brought art-making sharply into focus. Attending Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, he thrived in a curriculum of life drawing, studio and plein air painting, commercial design, illustration, perspective, lettering and art history courses. Don graduated with honors and an A.A. in Commercial Design.
Following graduation and a year at his first professional job at a design studio in St. Louis, Don went west to San Francisco in early 1970. There, he had the good fortune and timing to be hired as a production artist in the art department of Rolling Stone magazine, then only in their third year of publication. This led to additional layout responsibilities and designing books for Straight Arrow Books, a division of Rolling Stone. Other publication design and art direction jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area include: Earth Times magazine, Rags magazine, Clear Creek magazine, City magazine (of San Francisco) and California Monthly magazine (UC Berkeley Alumni). All of that fed into a 25-year employment at the Hearst Corporation-owned San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle as Senior Designer, Art Director and Design Director. Leaving the Chronicle in 2002, he has continued to work as an independent contractor, with clients ranging from corporations, non-profits, the arts, ballet to booze and beyond.
Don’s goals as a graphic artist have been to design impactful, on-message products with understated elegance in design and the aim to exceed a client’s expectations. Don’s fine art prints are informed by his career as a publication designer, where access to vast resources have given rise to some of his most recent works. Combining his original watercolors and drawings with typography and other scanned imagery, he creates digital collages in Photoshop. Custom permanent pigment prints (aka giclée prints) are made on paper or canvas. The prints are available in a variety of sizes and commissions are welcomed
Don and his wife, artist Kay Carlson, live in San Rafael, California.