Design Matters Live, Tonight with Elliott Earls

Adobe and AIGA San Francisco are presenting a very special series—Design Matters Live: Life, Love and the Pursuit of Design. Joining me tonight is Elliott Earls.

Elliott Earls is a highly respected graphic designer and performance artist. His work melds traditional graphic design with stagecraft—incorporating traditional media (including painting, sculpture, and photography) with digital video, spoken word poetry, and music composition—resulting in delightfully curious, historically rooted, unprecedented art. He is the founder of the Apollo Program, whose commercial clients include Elektra Entertainment, Nonesuch Records, Elemond Casabella (Italy), The Cartoon Network (UK), Imaginary Forces, PolyGram Classics and Jazz, and Janus Films. In May of 2002, Earls, in association with Émigré, released Catfish, a 55 minute film on DVD that traces his work from the lab to the stage in a highly manipulated digital film incorporating animation, stop motion photography, drawing, typography and live action.

Earls received his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1993. He has spent time at numerous American universities, and he has given workshops on design, culture and new media in both Europe and America. Earls spent September 2000-May 2001 as a Designer-in-Residence at Fabrica, Benetton’s studio/research center in Treviso, Italy. He has also taught typography, design, and multimedia at the State University of New York at Purchase. Earls was appointed Designer-in-Residence and head of the graduate graphic design department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in July 2001.

As a typographer, Elliot Earls has designed original type distributed worldwide by Emigré. As a performance artist, Earls was awarded an Emerging Artist grant by Manhattan’s prestigious Wooster Group. He has performed at the Cretiel Theatre Festival in France, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Oak Street Theatre in Portland, Maine, at Experimenta 99 in Lisbon, Portugal, at the Opera Totale in Venice, at Typo 2000 in Berlin, and at Living Surfaces in Park City, Utah. His work has won numerous awards and was included in ID Magazine’s 1996 Annual Design Review, the 1996 American Center for Design 100 Show, and the 1996 New York Art Director’s Club Show. The work of Elliot Earls has been featured in the books The Graphic Edge, Cool Type, Faces on the Edge, Type in the Digital Age, One and Two Color Graphics, and Cutting Edge Typography. His serial examination of “spiritual gangsters” has been published by Emigré. In 2001, Earls was a finalist for the Chrysler National Design Award in New Media. He was profiled in 2002 by Eye, Print and Punk Planet Magazines, and he has work in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

This is the agenda:

6:00 - 7:00 pm
Registration, Technology Expo & Reception

7:00 - 7:10 pm
Welcome & Keynote, John Loiacono, Senior Vice President, Creative Solutions Business Unit, Adobe Systems Incorporated

7:10 – 8:00 pm
The Creative Backstory Demo, Colin Fleming, Solutions Engineer, Adobe Systems Incorporated

8:00 – 9:00 PM Design Matters Live

Future Design Matters Live Events:
Noreen Morioka & Sean Adams of AdamsMorioka, live in Los Angeles, June 19
Emily Oberman & Bonnie Siegler of Number Seventeen, live in New York, June 25
Marian Bantjes, September 13
Alan Dye, November 8

Many thanks to ADOBE for making this event possible!
(and to Marian Bantjes for the incredible poster and all graphics)