Draft:David Ashton (designer)

David Ashton (born January 7, 1940) is an American graphic designer and illustrator. He’s known for creating the environmental graphic design of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which led to the redesign of Major League Baseball stadiums across the country.

Oriole Park at Camden Yards
In 1991, Janet Marie Smith, then-VP of planning and development for the Baltimore Orioles, invited Ashton on a tour of the stadium construction site. As they walked, Ashton hand-sketched a number of ideas he had for the project. Months later, he submitted his drawings and was hired to design all stadium graphics and touch points.

Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992. It was celebrated for its immersive, ballpark environment. Many of the features that made it a success were Ashton’s designs. He reintroduced pennant flags to the ballpark, designed ushers’ and ticket takers’ uniforms to look like they were from the 1950s, and insisted major sponsors, like Budweiser and Coca-Cola, submit archival advertisements from the same time period so they would complement, rather than interrupt, the park experience.

Ashton's respect for, and celebration of, nostalgic Americana were groundbreaking for stadium design at that time. Camden Yards would become known as “The Ballpark That Forever Changed Baseball.”

In 2022, former MLB commissioner Bud Selig commented, “Camden Yards may be one of the two or three most powerful events in baseball history. It changed everything. It really did. I’m not sure people grasp the significance of it.”

All of the original environmental graphics for the ballpark were created without a single computer, and most adhered close to Ashton's original sketches. In March 2014, Ashton’s collection of over 100 original drawings for the project was accepted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Oriole Park at Camden Yards continues to receive accolades for its visitor experience, with Stadium Journey ranking OPACY the No. 1 Ballpark Experience in 2014, 2015, and 2016.