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Eliminating the line between so-called fine and applied art.

Born 1938, into a working-class family in Detroit. His parents both came from Europe, while his mother came from a family of artists and his father sculpted in his free time.Fella was noted as an avid drawer in his youth, and credits his parents for his artistic intrigue. Striving to give their son the best possible education, his father enrolled him into a local college preparatory school. Later on due to Fella’s blatant disterest in the courses and bad grades, he attended the local trade school, Cass Tech High, where he studied lettering, illustration, paste-up, and other commercial-art techniques.

“Cass tech taught the Bauhaus foundation method where the art schools at the time in Detroit were stepped in the Beaux Arts,” –Fella

After graduating in 1957 at the age of eighteen, he went straight to work as an ap-prentice at a small firm that provided studio services to the Motor City’s vibrant, yet des-perately lacking in adventur-ous experiments, advertising industry. He worked steadily into the mid-1980’s freelanc-ing for clients primarily in auto-motive and health care.

While it is noted that Fella read voraciously, and as a young adult he took night classes on modern literature and other intellectual subjects, it should be noted that he actually flunked English in his high school days. He collected all kinds of musics. He was and remains a prolific photographer. He subscribed to numerous magazines of art and culture.

Fella is most noted for his freelance days. He was known for creating samples of different techniques as part of soliciting clients, like many freelance artists do. Coupling me-chanically reproduced material with advanced drawings and lettering skills. Fella created intricate and often whimsical collages for his portfolio. The possibilities for imag-ery and composition were expand-ed by photocopiers which were the time becoming popular in the office environment. Many of his pieces feature enigmatic messages, a re-sult of incorporating leftover bits of type into the design.

Later on in life Fella would meet two women influential to his future path, Looraine Wild, and Katherine McCoy who both worked with Fella atDesigners & Partners in suburban Detroit in the early 1970s.

– Looraine WildWorld-famous graphicdesigner, published writer,art historian, and art instructor of design.

– Katherine McKoyAmerican graphic designer and educator, best known for her work as the co-chair of the graduate Design program for Cranbrook Academy of Art.

While many designers talked about design and collected it, Fella was the only one making new work. - Wild

When McCoy eventually left freelancing to head up Cranbrook’s design department, she would later invite Fella to present his sample work to her students ten years before he would later enroll in there master’s program.

To help place things into perspective at this current place in time Adobe was still trying to figure out how to kern digital fonts when Fella was de-constructing lines of copy, modifying typefaces (Bembo into Bimbo by hack-ing off the serifs.), and jumbling them up. It would also be more then a de-cade before desktop publishing could come anywhere near the eye-bend-ing effects Fella was producing with copy-camera Photostats and Exacto knives.

Fella killing the game up here

Everyone else getting rained on down here

The alternative art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s provided a venue for Fella to take his work public. His post-ers, catalogs, and other collat-eral for various nonprofit arts organizations, cemented Fel-la’s reputation and formed the foundation his work today has evolved from. Specifically the Detriot Focus Gallery, in which he placed his disconnected illustrative doodles upon por-traits of the featured artist’s. While some could say that there is no apparent reason for this besides adding an in-teresting visual sideline, some would argue that a closer look reveals that Fellaactually helped to hide the inferior quality of the artist’s photographs.

At age forty-eight he enrolled in Cranbook’s graduate program to evolve past the design education that he gained when he attend-ed technical trade school during his high school years. Due to his already gained experience, Fella became a mentor to not only his classmates but his in-structors as well. Due to Cran-book’s open and encouraging environment Fella and those that came in contact with him were changed forever. Immediately After graduation Fella went on to become an instructor at the California Institute of the Arts, where he continued to worked until 2013. Fella has said that teaching allowed him to continue his design experiments without the rigors of a business-imposed schedule and mindset, that he experienced for over thirty years.

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“Disturb, distract, and distort” everything about them

“When you’re a student you want to deal with possibilities, Later on, you will deal necessities.”

In 1997 he re-ceived the Chrys-ler Award and in 1999 an Honorary Doctorate from CCS in Detroit. His work is in the National Design Museum and MOMA in New York.

In 2007, he was award-ed the AIGA medal. The highest possible honor for Graphic artists, which awards and acknowledg-es considerable contribu-tion to design. Founded in 1914 they reached there 100th anniversary this year!

Said to be a precursor to the decon-structed type of the early to mid 90’s.Ed Fella’s artistic style embodies a real sense of spontaneity that treads the line between art and pure experi-mentation.

Although he himself never took up the computer as a tool his preferred tool of choice being a four color ball point pen, his work later in-spired generations of digital font designers to create beat and poor typefaces on their advanced machines.

He produced a piece using only fonts whose names rhymed “to explore the result-ing aesthetics”

Despite his advancement and achieve-ments Fella remains modest saying that he Is small when compared to the works of those such as Wolfgang Weinfgart. He will however say that “Weingart’s work was an explosion in the Linotype factory …… he’s late modernist, while my work is postmodernists. It’s the difference be-tween connotation and denotation. We-ingart’s work is wonderful, but it’s done. The statement has been made, it’s an endpoint.”

People remain current throughout history as long as they are inquisitive and contin-ue experimenting.

–Wolfgang WeinfgartAn internationally known graphic designer and typog-rapher. His work is catego-rized as Swiss typography and he is credited as "the fa-ther" of New Wave or Swiss Punk typography.

“Ed Fella.” AIGA. Web. 29 Nov. 2014. <http://www.aiga.

org/medalist-edfella/>

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“Edfella.com.” Edfella.com. Web. 29 Nov. 2014. <http://www.edfella.com/resume.html>.

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