One could only wonder at the peculiar mind-space inhabited by their creator, apparently holed up in White Plains, somewhere outside of New York.Įmigre promoted these projects and Rudy VanderLans, clearly a big fan of Earls, has continued to feature his work, though a follow-up CD-ROM, Eye Sling Shot Lions, was independently distributed. Around this time, Earls launched a triptych of deranged-looking typefaces – Dysphasia, Dysplasia and Dyslexia – that confirmed his gifts as a practitioner of outlandishly dysfunctional design. It was some kind of landmark in a medium that had mostly failed to deliver on its early promise, and reviewers were impressed. In 1995, operating as ‘The Apollo Program’, he released a CD-ROM, Throwing Apples at the Sun, which invaded the desktop and plunged viewers into a Supercard labyrinth of pop-up windows, sound effects, spoken-word pieces and Quicktime movies, as one layer led to the next. Earls was in the process of reinventing himself and, after that, things just got weirder. The posters, he now reveals, represented something of a crisis.
In one, an Astro Boy doll bursts through a sheet of glass, accompanied by the copyline, ‘The side of my head hurts from thinking in the rain’ – an announcement both engagingly direct in its physicality and intriguingly obscure in its state of mind.
A package of material from Cranbrook (near Detroit, Michigan) included several posters by Earls, who was in his final year. My first encounter with his output came in 1993, when I was working on a survey of new design. He is one of those unclassifiable, mutant blooms thrown up by the fractured landscape of 1990s graphic design. If ever a designer seemed like a certified oddball, pursuing a trajectory far removed from the obligations of institutional life, it is Earls. Even for those who follow his activities with interest, the news that Elliott Peter Earls was to be a designer-in-residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art – a post formerly held by the McCoys and the Makelas – came as a something of a surprise.
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