Elliott Earls

Elliott Earls (born 1966) is an American graphic designer, artist and one man band performance artist. He is an artist-in-residence and head of the graduate graphic design department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Earls attended St. Xavier a Jesuit all-boys high school in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he focused on athletics. After high school, he attended and graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 1988. Earls then attended Cranbrook Academy of Art for graduate school; he completed his MFA there in 1993.

After graduating from RIT, Earls worked at de Harak and Poulin Associates in New York. Next he worked with David Cundy in New Canaan. In 1995, Earls created a CD of his design work called "The Apollo Program", which was named after the NASA program. In the mid-1990s, he developed three unusual typefaces: Dysphasia, Dysplasia and Dyslexia. His next CD-ROM was entitled Eye Sling Shot Lions. He worked for a few months as a graphic designer at Elektra Records. He also worked for Nonesuch Records, Little Brown, Scribner and the Cartoon Network. He has been called a "grunge graphic designer" for his creation of "distorted...older typefaces" and "aggressively illegible" type which adopted the "unkempt expressiveness" of the "grunge [music] aesthetic"; Earls' radical, anti-establishment approach was influenced by the Dada movement. One of his typefaces which has been called "grunge"-styled is Dysphasia.

After his "grunge" period, he developed cleaner-lined fonts, such as "Venus Diode, Jig Saw Dropshadow and Typhoid Mary". He has been an artist-in-residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art; as of 2002, he was the second person to hold this appointment. Earls became head of the graduate graphic design program at Cranbrook in 2001. His work is in the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Wolfsonian Museum, the Miami Art Museum, the Triennale Museum in Milan; the Cranbrook Art Museum; and in the University of Akron. During 2000 and 2001, Earls was an artist in residence in Fabrica, Benetton’s design studio in Treviso, Italy. Earls has been a teacher of "design, typography, and new media at the State University of New York at Purchase".

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