After spending nearly 30 years working in commercial design in Detroit, Ed Fella has since spent most of his time working to undo everything he did before, gleefully consigning to the rubbish heap design's accepted conventions in favor of his own splendid anarchy. As Rick Poynor's Typography Now: The Next Wave put it, "In Fella's agitated hands, type is spun, tilted, stretched, sliced, fractured, drawn as with a broken nib, and set loose among fields of ink-blotter doodles and networks of rules." This approach has won Fella myriad admirers, from publishers of quick-print books in Germany to the front page of Raygun, where his lettering stood as the very masthead of the graphically innovative magazine.

Although he no longer does commercial work, Fella, Polaroid in hand, roams the streets and byways of the country, documenting and cataloging the vast trove of American commercial signage. In fact, he has accumulated over 2,000 letter forms infused with all the gaudy, vibrant energy of the American commercial vernacular environment. Like Robert Venturi et al. did for the architecture of the Strip, Fella has reawakened interest in a field of visual inspiration that has fallen into neglect. Fella, who is a professor of design at Cal Arts, was awarded an honorary degree at Detroit's College for Creative Studies.