[1] After briefly working as an art director at McCann-Erickson advertising agency in San Francisco, Dann formed a boutique design group, 222, with several partners in the 1960s.
Most work was one-of-a-kind wood signage, massive doors, and other architectural details commissioned by designers and architects such as Gensler and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for civic buildings, corporations, private homes, restaurants, vineyards and department stores.
Dann carved the intricate oak doors leading to the Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion, Stanford University, built in 1978.
Secondly, he grew up fascinated by the multiple layers of interlocking symbology of the monumental carved totem poles and pillars of the Pacific Northwest's indigenous peoples.
San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker wrote in 1989, "Objects in Dann's world hunker and lurch with a comic animal energy, as if conducting secret lives behind our backs.
"The result is a liberation from wood construction to expressionist painting"[4] concluded Carol Fowler, Contra Costa Times art reviewer.