David Carson Paper

David Carson is often considered to be the most influential Graphic Designer of the 90’s. Utilizing unorthodox type settings and layouts, he crafted a distinct style that was often imitated and defined the grunge movement of the 90’s. His work with experimental type faces, photography, and lay outs, has not only influenced graphic designers of his era, but shifted the way graphic design is done today.

David Carson was born on September 8^th, 1955 in Corpus Christi Texas. In 1980 he attended San Diego State University and graduated with honors and distinction. Being a former professional surfer he was ranked 9^th during his days at college, his surfing background would influence his work with surfing lifestyle magazine. In 1990 David Carson began working with the surfing magazine known as Beach Culture. David Carson work with the magazine “shocked the design community” his use of unorthodox typefaces and odd layouts drew attention from critics who deemed his work innovative despite the criticism of him. In one issue, David Carson made the page numbers font larger then the headline, and moved them out of order. Eventually funding for Beach Culture dried up, resulting in the end of the magazine. After working with several other magazine, David Carson launched the magazine “Ray Gun” and music and lifestyle magazine. His work through this publication made Carson name well known as well as gaining attention for his unique work in graphic design. In 1995 David Carson founded his own studio in New York, called David Carson Design. From 1995 to 1998 He began to do design work for major corporate clients including Pepsi Cola, Nike, Microsoft, Budweiser, and many other major corporate clients. In 2000 he opened another private design studio in South Carolina. In 2004 Carson became the creative director for the Gibbes Museum of Art. He has written several books, including the famous “End of print” which is the best selling graphic design book of all time, selling over 200,000 copies. He most recent book, “Trek” chronicles his art and his life.

David Carson’s work can be described as highly unique and unorthodox by typical design standards. His work features, spread-out, inverted, and mixed font type. Often accompanying overlapping pictures. He has been known to mix capital and lowercase letters within words, blur letters, and place certain letters inside of boxes within the word. While working for Beach Culture, “Carson used Dingbat as the font for what he considered a dull interview with Bryan Ferry.” Carson explains: “Overall people are reading less, I’m just visually enticing them to read.”

David Carson approach to graphic design has drastically changed and influenced future graphic designers and the subsequent style of graphics design during the 90’s