Profile No. 1: Al Elliott

Personal wordmark, English Roundhand script, original size unknown, ink on illustration board, ca. 1972. 

Introduction

Alfred (Al) Elliott, 1922–1979, one of Canada’s finest lettering artists, was born in Richmond Hill, Ontario, then a small town just north of Toronto. After attending Northern Vocational Institute in Toronto, he served as a motorcycle dispatch rider in the Canadian Army during The Second World War.

In 1946 he enrolled in the Advertising Art program at The Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), graduating in 1949.

He would return to OCA to teach evening classes in lettering.

After graduating he worked at a number of leading commercial art studios in Toronto including ADS, TDF and Templeton, where he earned a reputation as a friendly guy who was both good and fast.

In April 1964 he joined The Headliners, the lettering division of Cooper & Beatty. Despite having a strong roster of top lettering artists on staff, Elliott was considered an important addition to the studio. Around the same time he also began designing script alphabets for The Headliners International in New York.

Elliott often used a brush rather than a pen, even for ornate formal scripts such as his name above. The few surviving art boards show remarkably little white touch-up.¹ In 1972 he set up a studio at his home in North York, where he continued to work for ad agencies, studios, and designers such as Jim Donoahue and Allan Fleming.

After suffering a massive heart attack, Al Elliott passed away in March 1979. 

Selected Works

Cockney Slang 

Photo-lettering poster, Cooper & Beatty. Design: Jim Donoahue, ca. 1970, size: 18.75 x 14.25 inches.

Designed by Jim Donoahue, Type Director at Cooper & Beatty, the title was hand-lettered by Elliott. The original artwork for this piece, along with two others, was discovered at Headliners in 1990.

The Headliners was Cooper & Beatty’s principal photo-lettering service, but they had a number of other suppliers, including Filmotype, the Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC), and Lettergraphics. This poster uses alphabets largely from Lettergraphics.² 

Most of those libraries were supplied as two-inch film fonts, but they could also simply be paper prints. The source of the alphabets was somewhat secondary—what mattered more was how individual artists used those alphabets—one reason why, in its early years, photo-lettering was always set by lettering artists.

The title lettering consists of two separate outlines with an inside shadow—all meticulously hand-drawn on illustration board. The first outline follows the contours of the base letters, leaving a white space, which is then enclosed by a slightly heavier outline. The inner thin line morphs into the shadow, which, at its thickest, matches the weight of the outer outline.

Elliott’s lettering is a highly intricate composition and a fitting visual expression of the layered and deliberately convoluted nature of Cockney street slang.

The National Ballet of Canada

Hand-lettered English Roundhand script, original size unknown. The faint dotted oval illustrates how Elliott could compose these complex scripts into pleasing shapes.

We know very little about this piece. It was likely commissioned by Allan Fleming, who began designing promotional material for The National Ballet of Canada in 1959 while he was at Cooper & Beatty.

The 18th-century English Roundhand was gradually transformed into a drawn letterform by 20th-century lettering artists largely working in advertising typography.³ 

What characterised Elliott’s handling of this style was his remarkable skill in containing words and flourishes within recognizable shapes. In this case, a complex and beautiful wordmark that seems to perform a graceful pirouette.

Elliott was careful never to let decorative flourishes overpower the words. He could always find the right balance and was not afraid to distort individual letters, e.g. the ‘f’ in the word ‘of’, in order to preserve the oval shape.

In the digital era these scripts have lost a certain cachet and, like the German blackletter, play a limited role in our culture.

Sensual Faces