David Carson

David Carson is a Texas born graphic designer mostly known for his use of experimental typography. During his early years Carson worked as a sociology professor but put most pride in his professional surfing career, ranking ninth in the world during his college days.

In the early eighties Carson worked as a teacher for the Torrey Pines High School in San Diego but soon he found himself attending a two week course in commercial design. Carson had found his new calling and spent a bit of time as a part time art director for a surfing magazine and then part time at a skateboarding magazine called Transworld which allowed him to experiment and create his signature ‘grunge’ style dirty type combined with unconventional pictures.

Carson became the art director of the magazine Beach Culture in 1989 and even though the journal only produced six issues until it folded Carson received over one hundred and fifty awards in design. David Carson was hired as the director of Ray Gun Magazine in 1992.In Ray Gun, an American alternative rock and roll magazine, Carson’s “layouts featured distortions or mixes of 'vernacular' typefaces and fractured imagery, rendering them almost illegible. Indeed, his maxim of the 'end of print' questioned the role of type in the emergent age of digital design” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_(graphic_designer). Within three years the circulation of Ray Gun tripled thanks to Carson’s innovative ideas. David Carson has been named ‘the father of grunge’ for the work he had done with his dirty type. He was immersed in the hippy bohemian culture of California and had found his bliss.

After taking leave of Ray Gun in 1995 Carson founded his own design company which holds offices in both California and New York. This is also the same year that Carson publishes his first book the “End of Print” selling over 200,000 copies and printed in five languages this became the best selling graphic design book in the world. The “End of Print” features various one-man exhibitions throughout Europe and Latin America, Asia and Australia.

In 2000 Carson opened a small private studio in South Carolina and only four years later became the Creative Director at Gibbes Museum of Art located in Charleston, South Carolina, the same area as his studio. Carson’s design firm continues to flourish and has had major clients such as Ray Ban and Pepsi Cola. He is attached to his creations; his work is different from other designers at the time. Carson created a type of work that allows the viewer to become immersed in the art, “ I.D. magazine chose Carson for their list of "America's most innovative designers", a feature in Newsweek magazine said of Carson "he changed the public face of graphic design"” (http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/?dcdc=top/s).

Carson has achieved numerous design awards including Designer of the year and Master of Typography. In 2004 Carson received the great recognition of being the most famous graphic designer on the planet by the London Creative Review magazine. Recently Carson has decided to branch out into film and television, directing commercials and videos. He made a short film with the same title of his first publication, “The End of Print”. He appears in others work and continues to keep his firm running. There is a documentary on Carson that is currently being filmed and looks to include much of Carson’s work along with a pleasing soundtrack.

Looking at David Carson’s work is truly an experience. Your eye focuses on what is most important, like the product brand name, and then moves around the work to focus on the other aspects of design and color. Posters created for the tsunami benefit in 2005 has you center on the text which is separated to seem like a letter is missing in the word help. Its quite creative, youre eye visually adds an extra ‘l’ to make hell .Carson’s posters made for the Obama campaign convey all the hope and change Obama had hoped for in the campaign. His text and placement makes the poster easy to look at but also incredibly fascinating to the viewer with letters that can interchangable with a consistant organic style.

Personally I believe that Carson’s work with Ray Gun Magazine is his most successful and creative pieces. The grungy text that jump started an era of design still stays as a common design technique today and I think it is beautiful. The text conveys a feeling which is what I believe a lot of designers try to achieve. Ray Gun not only started David Carson as a world phenomena but shaped Carsons work. Carsons designs at that time were new to people and really sent an image of grunge eighties style simply through text. Everyone else is simply trying to attain what Carson was able to do and still does today.