"Edward Fella, a former commercial artist, creates posters that break every known rule of typographic convention and designer good taste," says Rick Poynor. Ellen Lupton has written, "In Fella's work, the unfettered mind of a Dada/Fluxus hippie confronts the dextrous hand of a traditional commercial artist." Bruce Mau calls him "brilliant." Peter Hall says Ed Fella is "an agitator, an experimentalist, an educator, and an inspiration to a new generation of type designers" and says his "anti-slick, rule-breaking designs" are "eccentric to the point of being impossible to imitate." Clearly everyone agrees that Ed Fella is one of the most daring and extreme graphic designers in America today.Famous for his obsessive hand-drawn alphabets and glyphs, Fella creates work with the power and spontaneity of raw art that nonetheless is born from a great knowledge of the theory and technique of typography and graphics. As Rick Poynor says, "Fella doesn't so much take his line for a walk as force-feed it hallucinogens and release it babbling on to the page." This first book on Fella, designed by Lorraine Wild, contains numerous examples of the designer's work, including his radical typeface designs, which have been described as "spun, tilted, stretched, sliced, fractured, drawn as if with a broken nib, and set loose among fields of ink-blotter doodles and networks of rules." This title also features Fella's collection of Polaroid snapshots of the signs and symbols he sees on the streets. These photos, taken over a period of many years, serve as a record of vernacular architecture around the world as well as inspiration for Fella's own designs. The result is a book which will appeal to all designers and art directors, whether their love is photography or fonts, art direction or art.
Lewis Blackwell likes to make beautiful books with inspiring ideas. Whether it is his passion for trees, which led to the bestselling Life and Love of Trees (celebrated on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and featured on oprah.com, among others) or more arcane delights in the history of typography and vernacular signage (20th Century Type and Ed Fella Letters on America), or sharing his powerful insights from the top table in photography (Photowisdom), the resulting books are always highly visual, original in thought and word, and accessible.
Lewis finds the perfect project for a book typically combines a great subject to investigate with fascinating people to work with and remarkable places to visit. He is currently working on two projects that will take him around the world, from the depths of nature to the heights of technology. Or perhaps that will turn out to be the other way around...
You can contact him via his publishers PQ Blackwell. Visit www.pqblackwell.com
