Elliott Earls - rebelartistmusiciandesigner

I was lucky enough to meet Elliott Earls when I was still in school. At the time he was a recent grad from Cranbrook and had just thrown a perfectly good design career in the music industry out the window. He was fired for refusal to assimilate to corporate culture. Instead he followed his passion and started his studio "the Apollo Program" where he designed a series of fonts. David Carson and the "grunge" movement were in full force in the mid 90's, design was pushing boundaries never before possible thanks to the computer. But even in this chaotic environment Elliot stood out. He was the first designer that I had known to successfully blend the boundaries between fine arts and graphic design. His work had layers of meaning and depth that simply hadn't been explored by anyone at this point. He was a true innovator in every sense of the term. When I saw him speak it was his first time, he was promoting his new multimedia CD "Throwing Apples at the Sun" along with a new font "Venus Dioxide". It was an awkward engagement, nobody knew what to make of what they where seeing, even the Venus Dioxide poster was a bit disturbing since it had a twisted image of his naked wife as the main subject. The strangest thing was the Q&A, nobody knew what to say about what he presented, it was so far out there. So everyone focused on the music he created for the Multimedia CD when making comments. Someone asked if he was a musician and he laughed, quickly saying "no", he claimed to have thrown the music together in a program on his computer and had little interest in music. Since that day Elliott has become head of the Design Department at Cranbrook Academy. He pursued music, releasing a few albums with various bands, and became a very successful performance artist. Not to mention the posters and fonts that he has designed over the years that have gained him national notoriety. I ran across this video and it sparked my memory of meeting Elliott and it reminded me of how much his message had stuck with me to this day. It also made me question if his story would resonate with young designers today, where there seems to be very little debate about whether design is art, or if art even has a place within design. Self expression? High level concept? What's that?