Cliff Roberts

Cliff Roberts illustrations have cropped up on many design blogs of late and feeling left out I thought it was time to feature him here.

Roberts was a cartoonist and animator in the 1950s+, working for companies and clients such as Sesame Street, Playboy, Ford Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Later on in life he also worked as a photographer and had work featured in the 1964's World's Fair and also wrote, animated and directed popular Saturday morning cartoons such as Scooy-Doo, The Smurfs and The Pink Panther.

I really love this style, where everything is broken down to simple, basic forms and colour palettes. Even though the images are flat they are still so charming and American in aesthetic. Cliff was born in 1929, retired in 1993 and sadly died in 1999.

I haven't managed to find much information about Roberts, but I did find this gem from Todays Inspiration blogspot. It shows one of the newspaper comic strips that Roberts created in the 1970s for the Children's Television Workshop, Sesame Street, which was still fairly new then. For the strip, he created two characters called Jasper and Julius, a comedy duo.

Among my research I also discovered that he illustrated these beautiful and rare editioned books in 1955 and 1956: The First Book of Jazz by Langston Hughes and Thomas by Mary Harris.










Thanks to davidgeorgepearson at flickr.com for the The First Book of Jazz images and lemon.wonder at flickr.com for the Thomas images.