TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Fri Dec 13 00:45:23 EST 2024

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ABOUT

Rob Roy Kelly

Rob Roy Kelly (b. Nebraska, 1925, d. Tempe, AZ, 2004) collected wood type from local printers for use by his students at the Minneapolis College of Art&Design. He began gathering the types in the late 1950s and continued adding to the collection over the next decade. He started researching the history, manufacture, and use of the growing collection partly in response to questions that arose from working with his students. His research was first published in the 1963 issue of Design Quarterly (No. 56), and was followed in 1964 by a limited-edition folio of specimen sheets from the collection, entitled American Wood Types 1828-1900, Volume One. Kelly's research would culminate with the publishing in 1969 of American Wood Type, 1828-1900: Notes on the Evolution of Decorated and Large Types and Comments on Related Trades of the Period. Since 1993, his substantive wood type collection resides at the University of Texas. At Dover, he published 100 Wood Type Alphabets. Kelly's final work with the Collection came in the early 1990s when he was asked by Adobe Systems to participate in a project to develop digital revivals of historic wood types as part of the Adobe Originals program. As consultant to the project, Kelly helped select, from his own collected materials, the type styles that would be made into digital fonts. Kelly died in January 2004.

Obituary, which states: He studied design at the University of Nebraska and the Minneapolis School of Art and served in the Army during the Korean War. Later he did graduate work at the School of Art and Architecture at Yale, where he studied with Josef Albers, Alvin Eisenman, Alvin Lustig, Herbert Matter, Leo Lionni, Lester Beall and Alexey Brodovitch. He both taught and administered graphic design programs at the Minneapolis College of Art, Kansas City Art Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Western Michigan University and, most recently, at Arizona State University.

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