Edward Fella

Edward Fella (born 1938) is an American graphic designer, artist and educator. He created the OutWest typeface in 1993.

Early life Edward Fella was born in Detroit, MI in 1938 to a middle-class family and attended Cass Technical High School, a magnet school in Detroit where he studied lettering, illustration, paste-up and other commercial-art techniques. He graduated from Cass Tech in 1957 and went into the commercial graphic industry.

Career and education thumbEdward Fella was a commercial artist for 30 years, from 1957 to 1987. Most of the works he created during this time were automotive and health care posters. Fella was given the name "the king of zing" because of his whimsical illustration style he had.

1960s and 1970s During the 1960s and 1970s Fella felt that his commercial work was not enough for him and he became very active in Detroit's cultural scene. He offered his services to some alternative art institutions and became the designer for the Detroit Focus gallery. There he created dozens of event posters and directed the Detroit Focus Quarterly. These clients gave Fella the opportunity to print and make public work similar to the experimental designs he had been creating in private. Fella used a positive photostat machine and made collages images and type that had been readily available. While at Cranbrook, Fella refined his craft, combining new creative experimentation with his 30 years of experience as a commercial artist. After graduating from Cranbrook, Fella was hired to teach at California institute of the Arts by Lorraine Wild in 1987. Because of this Fella gained a huge following by the time he was fifty and became a controversial new designer. Fella was given the title of "Graphic godfather" by Emigre magazine. He had a style that was unique to him at the time it was slightly based on the theory of deconstruction, but he took that and pushed it even further. He distorted a style of sans-serif with his own hand writing with various thicknesses, curves, and tails to each character so that each one is different from the one before. Fella is one of the most extreme example of a typographer who is able to achieve the same creative freedom as the painters and sculptors he promoted in catalogs and posters.

According to this article, his first job after finishing high school was an apprenticeship at Phoenix Studios, a commercial art space. His day-to-day work during his time as a commercial artist was drawing headlines and layouts which helped refine his style and skill. Later studying at Cranbrook, Fella had the freedom to continue and concentrate on his artistic exploration and experimental designs. Fella's work developed into an elaborate pseudo-anarchic designs very different from anything being made at the time. His designs impacted and influenced a new era of designers who wanted to make a claim to the design world. He was also the recipient of a Chrysler Award in 1997. Curt Cloninger called Fella "the contemporary master of hand-drawn typography."