Dan Jonsson was born in Sundsvall in 1933, but his father was a construction worker, and thus his first years of life were nomadic, travelling between different job sites. In Nynäshamn, a drawing teacher discovered Dan’s talent and opened the door to a life the young boy probably would not have imagined for himself. In 1953, he began at Konstfack, the College of Arts, Crafts and Design, having saved up the fee by working as a manual labourer on the construction of Tullinge Airport...Read more. He was a member of a new generation that would revolutionize advertising and graphic design in Sweden in the 1960s. After Konstfack, Dan started working at the Ervaco agency, spending all his spare time freelancing as an illustrator. In 1966, he went solo, leaving the ad agency and working full-time as a freelance illustrator. Dan had many clients, but most of his work appeared in Sweden’s leading daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, and in Femina and Vi magazines. He enjoyed designing book covers, too, and when Sjöwall-Wahlöö’s Story of a Crime series was rereleased in the 2010s, he was commissioned to design the covers of all ten of the classic books. Dan Jonsson’s illustrations and graphic design were rich in ideas, with a consistent yet playful graphic clarity. His illustrations have been exhibited in Japan, Mexico, Italy and the US, and he is represented at both the Nationalmuseum in Sweden and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. He was elected to the prestigious Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1981, and appointed a professor of graphic design at his old school, Konstfack, in 1990. He had come full circle. Dan Jonsson died in 2020 at 87.

– J.N.