Donald Myers Anderson, educator, painter, author and designer, was born in Bridgewater, South Dakota on December 13, 1915. Anderson earned his BA and MA in Art at the University of Iowa and studied with Fletcher Martin, Jean Charlot and Philip Guston.

Between 1941 and 1946, he served in the U.S. Army as an illustrator in the Ordinance Department of the Pentagon. Anderson later designed books for the Army Adjutant General and the Civil Aeronautics Board. He began his long teaching career in 1947 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where, as Professor of Art, he taught design, lettering and watercolor until his retirement in 1982. He authored two textbooks, The Elements of Design in 1961 and The Art of Written Forms in 1969. The latter was reissued in 1992 as Calligraphy: The Art of Written Forms.

Today his is remembered as a designer, calligrapher, and teacher of calligraphy. Anderson’s design clients included the University of Wisconsin and the State of Wisconsin and he worked for numerous magazines. His paintings were shown throughout the Midwest in the 1950s and 1960s. In his retirement, he continued to produce and design calligraphic booklets and broadsides. He died in Madison on September 5, 1995.