Essay On David Carson

1284 Words3 Pages

By Kirti Bansal

“DON’T MISTAKE LEGIBILITY FOR COMMUNICATION”-DAVID CARSON

Rules are made to be followed, correct? No. According to surfer-turned-designer David Carson rules are meant to be broken – not followed. Carson’s explorations in the alternative rock and roll magazine Ray Gun pushed boundaries so far it brought catastrophically pleasing results. The peak of David Carson’s career commenced with his most recognized work in Beach Culture while art directing a surfing magazine. His creative and radical contributions to the realm of graphic and communication design fabricated relatively extreme results. Carson’s unconventional style revolutionized visual communication in the 1990s.
In the years prior to his career, American designer David Carson could be seen surfing tidal waves of the beaches in San Diego, California while maintaining a high school teacher career job. The influence of his talent can be traced to a short commercial design class he had enrolled in. Later working as a designer at a small surfer magazine, Self and Musician where his experiments truly initiated.
A painter in disguise some would say- David Carson practiced communicative typographic structures the way an artist used paint to create expressive compositions. Carson often extracted ordinary items for his composition layering them with text, though often illegible to the viewer, within, beside, over, and under the image. A handwritten quality while, at other times, strict typewriter font types was his choice with a mixture of capital and lowercase letters. Carson tested the boundaries of typography, having typed lines run into each other, cross gutters or be upside-down. He layered type and image until neither was distinguishable on the page and co...

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...thin the graphic design industry. Designers and those with interest in the graphic arts are drawn to his pieces and overall style. Carson’s impact on the design community is apparent in his design style as well as in his ability to share his talent and knowledge with others through his books. The American Center of Design has featured multiple works by Carson in its yearly show. In 1996, it determined that the new work by Carson was “the most important work in this year’s show”. A London-based publication called his work “the most important work coming out of America” and named him “Art Director of the Era”. Carson later went on to become the Creative Director of Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston and currently owns David Carson Design where he is chief designer. He now owns two personal design studios and still creates his signature style designs to this day.

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