. . . : : History / David’s Bio, Background & Achievements
“Many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.”
— C H R I S T O P H E R R E E V E / S U P E R H U M A N W H O C O N V I N C E D U S A M A N C O U L D F L Y B O T H O N F I L M A N D I N L I F E
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Celebrating Happy Accidents
Embracing synchronicities when they arrive serve as fine breadcrumb trails to awakenings. There is something magical about discovering happy accidents. We revel in these precious moments when we surprise even ourselves. It’s in these occasions of clarity when we are given the final clue to discovering the hidden treasure subliminally hiding in plain sight. When I reached my 27th year I wanted to celebrate by designing a Vinson logo variant.
I didn’t purposely hide the number twenty-seven within the letters. It was completely by chance that there were two clear instances of the number hidden within the design. I didn’t discover the two twenty-sevens until I finished designing the graphic. If they were snakes I surely would have been bitten. Twice. My Vinson Design logotype contains two dots and seven parts. Designed three decades ago at UGA, it still retains 95% of that initial design.
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A Helluva Brand Wrangler
Celebrating thirty-eight years of design, animation, visual effects, and friendships in contract and full-time capacities. My collaborations roster above represents the brands I’ve been trusted with to deliver solid creative, training, and consulting for nearly four decades. Also included are the design groups, production companies, post houses, and other friendly folks that have guided me through this journey. Fueled by word of mouth, one project led to the next, and the next, year after year. I was recruited by the best and ghosted by the rest. :)
These relationships ranged from a couple of weeks to fourteen, even nineteen years, with The Weather Channel in Atlanta and Georgia Museum of Art in Athens respectively. I’m so thankful for all of the incredible teams, dreams, and memories. Looking forward to many more years, just a bit different. I’ve shifted gears in order to pursue writing historical fact and fiction as a bipolar Renaissance man. I’m currently writing a three-act stage play, film treatments, and a novel series that chronicles half a century of my mental health marathons.
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Amphibian Air Car
David’s freelance art career began at age 12 while painting watercolors of family friends’ pets including a rather famous bulldog’s cousin who could fit four tennis balls in his mouth side by side. Four years later, in 1988, David got his first big break. He was introduced by Kay Farmer, his high school AP art teacher, to Jerry Barber, inventor of the famous Free Fall amusement park ride among dozens of other creations. Mr. Barber needed an illustrator for three new ride concepts he was pitching to some of the largest ride manufacturers in the United States. Jerry asked Kay if she had the time to dedicate to the project, but she passed on the opportunity due to other commitments, so she suggested David.
With the green light in sight David worked closely with Jerry upfront in order to understand the full scope of this multitiered project. Multiple ride concepts were illustrated with the primary pitch being the air car ride. Mr. Barber and David coined the name of the primary ride for the pitch called the Amphibian Air Car ride. It was essentially an amphibious form of bumper cars in a mash up with Florida swamp fan boats. Below are the patent illustrations as well as the letter from Jerry the following year. David’s renditions were airbrush, colored pencil, and spray paint.
It was an amazing opportunity, but what David remembers most is the moment he was invited into Mr. Barber’s home for their initial meeting. There had to be a least fifty patents covering the walls of the showman’s house. It was quite clear that Jerry had a busy mind. It was humbling to be fortunate enough to work for such an enigmatic, creative genius.
Jerry Barber is now pursuing wind turbine technology. Please take a moment and visit Barber Wind Turbines.
“Vinson’s career is the fulfillment of what desktop futurists were promising in the early 90s: the emphasis on the artist, not the facility.”
— Customer Feature | BLACKMAGIC DESIGN / Case Studies
“David consistently branded dozens of exhibition catalogs and texts over the course of his 19-year alliance with the Georgia Museum of Art for artists spanning nearly every genre. Most years we won multiple awards including Gold and Best of Show at the Southeastern Museums Conference.”
— Bonnie Ramsey | GEORGIA MUSEUM OF ART / Director of Publications & Public Relations
“Every time I’m in a position to hire a new designer, I say “I’m looking for a David Vinson.” Without a doubt, David is one of the most talented designers I’ve ever met, both technically and creatively. We’ve hired David for projects at CBS3 where the deadlines would have been impossible for others to meet. Not only did he meet the deadlines, he delivered work that blew us away. He is more than just a great designer. He is honest, straightforward, personable, and demonstrates exceptional character. If you’re lucky enough to have him on your team, lock the door and throw away the key.”
— Ken Keagy | SIMMER CREATIVE / Principal & Design Director
“It is always a pleasure to work with David and Outpost Pictures. His creative insights and knowledge in motion design makes for exceptional creative concepts and a great finished product. David is always on-time and professional in his delivery of creative assets. From initial concepts all the way through comps and animation production, David can always be counted on for outstanding work. David is a trusted design resource for our company and we would highly recommend his talents for any design project no matter the size or scope.”
— Brett Stacy | MAXMEDIA / Associate Creative Director
“David knows how to develop and deliver fantastic creative. I had the pleasure of working with David on numerous projects and was always amazed at the digital magic he created. From incredible graphic design, to unbelievable promotional imagery, David helped deliver on the brand evolution and on many program marketing projects. He approached every initiative with a passion for design, was easy to work with, and was a fun guy to be around.”
— Paul Greenberg | YP / Executive Director of Marketing
“While at the Weather Channel, I have hired, rehired, and used David as an external vendor. He is a creative professional of extraordinary talent. David has a clear understanding of branding and provides solutions that work within the overall creative strategy of the brand. He possesses an infectious creative energy and consistently provides an abundance of outstanding solutions for each assignment. I cannot provide a higher recommendation and if given the chance, I would not hesitate in hiring David again.”
— Rick Booth | NEW ENGLAND SPORTS NETWORK / Director of Creative Services
Tools of the Trade
Meet my 17-year-old 15 inch MacBook Pro with an SSD and 8 GB of RAM upgrade. It’s my primary go to for my writing. To this day Snow Leopard is still the snappiest and most well designed version of Mac OS X and macOS ever made. It’s the iPhone 6S of operating systems. I had my iPhone 6S for six years before getting a used iPhone 12 Pro. I also have a 27–year-old iMac with the original 6 GB HD running Mac OS 9.2.2, a 16-year-old 27 inch iMac named “Yoda” running Sierra and Snow Leopard loaded with 2019 non-A.I. versions of Adobe CC, and a 2023 Dell XPS running current versions of Adobe CC, Maxon One, and DaVinci Resolve with an RTX 3090 for Blender and Unreal with Windows 11 named “Vader” sporting a 4K display and Wacom tablet. I’ve recently added “Skywalker,” a 2020 5K iMac and “Rogue One,” a 14-inch M3 Pro MacBook Pro. I’m a big believer that sometimes the latest gear isn’t always the best for the job at hand. My 27 inch iMac is 12 years older than my Dell XPS, but for vector-based work it’s just as peppy. I also continue the art of napkin and Post-It sketches working out a concept on paper before ever jumping into Adobe Illustrator. As of 2026 I’ve completely migrated over to Affinity Suite. I’ve also unplugged myself from the Adobe and Maxon matrix. No more subs for me. I won’t be back.
CDV11 . . . 1DENT1TY 407 . . . ACT1VATED 1NTU1T1ON . . . LUCKY 27 . . . COSMIC NUMBER 3
Artist . . : Thinker : . . Dreamer . . : Polymath : : : INFJ . : : : Modest Psychic of Magenta Sea . : .
While aboard The Bantu Wind, Marion wipes the grimy mirror and then quickly flips it over. “Waaahhh!” Indy wearily glances over at Marion: “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.”
— Indiana Jones portrayed by Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Executive Producer and Story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. Screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan. Music by John Williams. Director of Photography, Douglas Slocombe. Produced by Howard Kazanjian (Executive), George Lucas, (Executive), Frank Marshall, Robert Watts (Associate). SpecialFX/VFX by ILM.
Industry Veteran
For nearly four decades David maintained his hired gun art, design, motion, and VFX career alongside full-time engagements. His passion for excellence delights his fellow teammates and expansive collaborator roster. Word-of-mouth advertising has remained his silver bullet.
David possesses an innate passion for our mental health advocacy, recovery, and strategy for ceasing stigma. He has made many contributions to the mental health community.
Collaborators: ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, TNT, MTV Puerto Rico, NBA TV, Fox Sports, New England Sports Network, Atlanta Hawks, The Weather Channel, The Weather Channel Latin America, CN8 The Comcast Network, DirecTV, Philips Arena, Russell Athletic, Little Debbie, Georgia Pacific Television, Ford, Verizon, Tandus, Adobe, Red Giant Software, Zaxwerks, Regions Bank, Ted and Shemane Nugent’s SpiritWild Productions, Bozeman Art Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, Madison Morgan Cultural Center, TIAA-CREF, Southern Progress, Southern Living At Home, Toolfarm, Ledet, and Digital Voodoo.
At in-house agencies David led creative efforts on branding and commercial execution for NBA TV, The Weather Channel, Ford, Time Warner Cable, Moe’s Southwest Grill, Viking, Birmingham Southern College, Preakness, and Smithfield; video installations for Raytheon, World of Coke, The Harmon Hotel, and the United States Postal Inspection Service at the Smithsonian; website lead-in animations for UPS and Universal; and corporate videos for BBVA Compass, Mohawk, Wiser, the United States Postal Service, Bridgestone Corporation, Bridgestone Golf, and Southern Living At Home.
Notables
• Featured Artist, “Talkin’ Bout the Weather,” Website Customer Feature, Blackmagic Design Case Studies
• Featured Artist: Adobe Systems, Inc., Discreet Logic, and Integrated Computing Engines demo reels
• Featured Artist: “23 Very Special Effects Products,” DCC magazine
• Speaker and Demo Artist, Adobe Systems, Inc., Savannah College of Art & Design, Savannah, GA
• Demo Artist, Adobe Systems, Inc., National Association of Broadcasters trade show, Las Vegas, NV
• Demo Artist, Alias | Wavefront 3December event, RealViz, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
• Web Press Release: “Ice Announces Ice’d Commotion,” ICE
• Featured Web Article: “The Weather Channel Goes On ICE,” ICE
• Featured ICE Articles: Video Systems magazine, Millimeter magazine, and Film & Video magazine
• Featured Chapter and Contributing Writer (uncredited), Premiere and After Effects Studio Secrets, Wiley
• Developed Super Rays for Shine and Particles Volume 1 for Trapcode Particular for Red Giant Software
• Co-creator, Knoll 3D Flare Adobe After Effects plug-in, with Red Giant Software’s Aharon Rabinowitz and MotionScript’s Dan Ebberts
• Created engaging training materials for the Knoll Lens Flare Pro Training DVD for Red Giant Software
• Developed a JavaScript “Splatter FX” engine utilizing 30 hand-crafted texture maps and Trapcode Particular for Adobe After Effects
• Designed Knoll 10 Pack for Knoll Light Factory for Red Giant Software, (“Flash Gordon” and “Sunny D” were included in the release of Knoll Light Factory version 3.0)
Accolades
• Best of Show, Southeastern Museums Conference
• 2 Gold, Southeastern Museums Conference
• First Place Brochures, Southeastern Museums Conference
• Silver, Southeastern Museums Conference
• Best of Category, Printing Industry Association of Georgia
• Bronze, Independent Book Publishers Awards
• Honorable Mention, American Association of Museums Publication Design Competition
• 2 Honorable Mentions, Southeastern Museums Conference
• Merit Award, Potlatch Papers
• Merit Award Best Theme, Calendar Marketing Association
• Honorable Mention, The National T-Shirt Art Event of the Century
• 3 Gold BDAs • 1 Bronze BDA • 1 Silver Promax • 3 Silver Tellys
• 3 Bronze Tellys • 2 Silver Addys • 1 Silver Mark
Memorable Moments
• Sneaking a peek at ILM’s Kerner location with E.T. and seeing the Hook Neverland matte painting
• Designed Knoll 3D Flare precursor while in Boston training NESN creatives
• Meeting Lamar Dodd in his home studio while he was cataloging his works
• “Leaves!” 4 am time-lapse film shoots with Latvian Director Ben Butin
• Long distance call with Grant Petty in the 90s about the D1 Desktop
• Viewing Albrecht Dürer’s portfolio at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence
• My Raiders of the Lost Ark Illustrated Screenplay from Dad
• Crash and burning model kits in the backyard
• Catching Robin Williams at The Fox in Atlanta
• Christopher Reeve’s inspiring BDA keynote
• My Superman farewell poster from TWC
• Adobe After Effects Prerelease cycles
• Bringing “Garyana Jones” to life
I still use my loupe and enjoy digging through my tackle boxes of traditional tools. Most are from my time in Savannah, Georgia, at SCAD, and in Athens at the University of Georgia’s Graphic Design program. Many go as far back as middle and high school in the 80s when I was selling dozens of watercolors, 500+ caricatures, and hyper detailed airbrushed Freddy Krueger T-shirts.
Notes from the Artist
When I was six years old in 1978 my life path was chosen. Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Starlog magazine, Superman: The Movie, Mork & MIndy, Lucas, Spielberg, and my own First Grade Journal of “Stories That Come Alive” lit my path and struck my young bipolar mind in a flash of lightning and wicked crack of thunder. Unlike many I saw Star Wars a year later in 1978 during our time in Paoli, Pennsylvania, where the school bus kids called me “Hulk” because I always scowled and did favor Lou Ferrigno. I guess I was “always angry” battling my undiagnosed manic depression plus I needed glasses which didn’t happen until I was 19. The line for Star Wars was still wrapped around the theatre showing its draw was still strong a year after its release. I was drawn to optical effects inconsistencies nudging my Mom every time I said “mommy that was wrong.” She indulged my curiosity and taught me how to draw a Stormtrooper from my Star Wars Storybook that same year.
By 1984, at age 12, I began selling watercolors to family friends while taking lessons from Mrs. McManus alongside my friend Steve, incredibly talented artist and Dungeon Master. I collected the AD&D rule books as I was drawn into the myths and legends of arcana and loved drawing the various demigods and beasties. I met Jerry Barber, inventor of the FreeFall™ amusement park ride in 1988 called on to illustrate three new rides for his pitches to the largest ride manufacturers in the country. In spring of 1990 I drew 240 caricatures of my classmates for our senior class T-shirt which garnered my first national recognition.
I studied studio art, color theory, advanced typography, and graphic design at Savannah College of Art & Design in Savannah and University of Georgia in Athens. I assisted in my Advanced Figure Drawing and Layout courses while styling morphs on Commodore Amigas in the computer lab. Having been combining art and technology since I was eleven gave me an advantage during the transition of analog to digital tools half way through my path at UGA. I was just as excited about H&Js in QuarkXPress as was our typographic sage Professor Ronald Arnholm who studied under Paul Rand at Yale. My own obsession with typography began when I was eleven while falling hard for Print Shop Deluxe on my C64. My true intention in wanting the C64 was playing games. It had the most robust graphics at that time in computer history. How ironic that my favorite game had no graphics at all.
Text adventure games had hooked my generation allowing our imaginations to fill in the visuals. Zork I by Infocom that originated at MIT left a considerable impression on me because it taught me that with story alone one can immerse themselves into a fantasy world. I can still hear my screeching dot matrix printer as it printed an ongoing transcript of my daily adventures in The Great Underground Empire.
In search of absolute geometric perfection, my Vinson logotype I designed in Typography class at UGA always haunted me. For years I designed logo variants always coming back full circle to the original design I realized in ten minutes. 27 years later I tightened up and refined my personal mark. How telling that my focus on stencils during my senior year in high school would lead to such a logo. I saw it in my mind and within minutes nearly nailed it. Professor Arnholm’s impression of my ten minute solution was “that will last a long time.” His sentiment meant the world to me. I even coined the term “Yin & Yang Ligatures” specifically birthed from my own logotype’s union of positive and negative space.
Not to date myself even further than I already have I am doubly thankful for riding the waves during the early days of arcades and home computer gaming. I have the latest Nvidia RTX GPU for playing modern games on my Windows 11 PC, but prefer playing text adventures like Zork I, shoot ‘em up titles like Ultimate Doom, and leveling up to challenge Diablo himself in a final, epic battle. I also enjoy playing Cyan’s Myst and LucasArts Dark Forces on my minty 1999 Blueberry iMac I bought for $60 well over ten years ago.
Let’s take a quick stroll back to Zork. In case you ever find yourself battling the Troll and Cyclops on your way to challenging the Thief to a final brawl in his own Treasure Room I have some bits to share and assist in your quest for unlocking the Jewel-encrusted Egg. The moment you discovered your first prize Up a Tree during your first few moves around the White House and Forest you knew it was a mechanism requiring absolute care and skill you didn’t possess. Having left it somewhere in the Cellar or the Maze the Thief casually picks it up taking it back to his lair. Once the Thief has taken apart the precious Egg exposing the Clockwork Canary all that’s left is to wind it in the Forest where a songbird will drop your final prize. I leave you with the secret way to kill the Thief with his own weapon:
TREASURE ROOM
> give thief egg
> get stiletto
> down
> up
> kill thief with stiletto [or ‘g’ for ‘again’ command]