Elliott Earls

Elliott Peter 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.

Early life 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.

Career

Graphic design After graduating from RIT, Earls worked at de Harak and Poulin Associates in New York. 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". In July, 2019 Earls re-released the original footage from "Catfish" as Episode 85 of his Studio Practice YouTube series.

Filmmaker

Earls made a film entitled Catfish in 2002. It is a documentary which includes "...highly manipulated digital film..., animation, stop motion photography, drawing, typography and live action".

Aesthetics and theorization ADSR model On 15 December 2016 in Episode 30 of Studio Practice, Earls outlined his ADSR "ADSR (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) Method For The Evaluation of Works of Art." ASDR is an approach to sound synthesis. In the Earls ADSR Method, works of art and design can be evaluated (critically assessed) through a waveform model.

In this model, the "Attack" phase of the work corresponds with Charles Sanders Peirce's Concept of "Firstness" and is understood to be the "immediate emotional, phenomenological and optical reaction to the work" in the first one-onehundred thousandth of a second in the presence of a work of art/design.

The "Decay" phase begins the moment the work "is subjected to a cognitive load." Decay marks the moment the individual in the presence of the object of art/design "begins to think through the work." It is "when we attempt to make sense of the art experience." Earls has written and stated "Works of Art must be able to endure, and more importantly reward a sustained cognitive load."

This statement is related to both the Decay and the Sustain of the art experience. For Earls, "Sustain" is the "level of intellectual, emotional, or phenomenological traction in the direct presence of the work." In the "Sustain" stage, "some works reward deep thinking, others punish."

According to Earls, the "Release" phase of a work of art/design begins the moment one leaves the presence of the object/experience, and "is a measure of the level of cognitive persistence of a work after the viewer has left the direct presence of the object/experience."