Notes

Al Elliott was a highly respected Toronto lettering artist who was active from the late 1940s to 1979. He was born in 1922 in Richmond Hill, then a small town north of Toronto. Elliott attended Northern Vocational Institute prior to serving in the Canadian Army as a motorcycle dispatch rider in the Second World War, where he met and married his British-born wife, Muriel. On returning to Canada, he held a variety of short-term jobs, including working on a railway section gang. He attended the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) from which he graduated in Commercial Art in 1947 and where he subsequently taught evening courses.

After graduation, Elliott initially practiced his craft at a number of Toronto-based commercial art studios, including Art & Design Studio (ADS), TDF, and Templeton. He soon gained a reputation for excellence in creative lettering design and execution, for applications ranging from print advertising to book design and corporate identification. In 1955 he applied for membership in The Arts & Letters Club (A&LC).

In April 1963 he joined The Headliners, a division of Cooper & Beatty. Headliners was a photo lettering studio servicing ad agencies and design studios, and although they had some of the cities’ leading lettering artists on staff, Elliott was considered a major acquisition. During this period Elliott designed a number of Headliners scripts that were quite popular. In 1972 he left Headliners to freelance from his home in Willowdale (now North York). He also designed two well-known scripts (Neo-Balladeer and Neo-Charade) both licensed to Headliners International in New York. Elliott was the ‘go-to’ lettering artist for many of the country’s leading designers including both Allan Fleming and Jim Donoahue.

Al Elliott died suddenly of a heart attack in 1979. Shortly after his father’s death, Jeffrey Elliott arranged for an exhibition of his work to be held at OCAD. The Al & Muriel Elliott Scholarship at OCAD was established in 1980 by Jeff Elliott, friends, and family. The scholarship is for excellence in lettering and letter forms and is awarded to the student with the highest grade in GRPH-3013 Advanced Typography. – Rod McDonald