Nick Kingsbury
Computer Graphics
March 28, 2010
David Carson
Interestingly enough, Davis Carson, born in 1955 in Texas, did not go to school to become a graphic designer. His degree is in sociology from San Diego Sate University; far from the realm of art. In the 1970s, Carson worked as a sociology teacher at a California high school. He also dabbled in professional surfing, ranking 9th in the world. His formal training in graphic design came from brief 2 to 3 week classes he took at the University of Arizona and in Switzerland in the 1980s. This is when he discovered his talent.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Carson was a major influential force behind skateboarding and surfing magazines and campaigns. Such magazines included Beach Culture, Transworld Skateboarding, and Self and Musician. The work he did at these venues brought him notice and further opportunities for his innovative grunge style and typographic oddities to flourish. Publisher Marvin Scott Jarrett was impressed with Carson’s work and hired him to design a music and lifestyle oriented magazine called Ray Gun. His work in Ray Gun magazine brought him even more fame and reputation. So when he started his own design firm, David Carson Design, in 1995, he soon had accounts with major companies including Ray Ban, Microsoft, and Pepsi.
Carson says he is most interested in the emotion of design. There is an emotional response to the design piece that the viewer experiences before they even read the text or figure out what is trying to be sold or promoted. He went on to publish a number of books detailing his work including “The End of Print: The Graphic Deisgn of David Carson,” “2nd Sight,” and “Fotografiks: An Equilibrium Between Photography and Design Through Graphic Expression That Evolves from Content.”
Carson travels frequently, giving speeches and seminars about his work and graphic design as a whole. One such speech, “David Carson on Design + Discovery,” was recorded and posted on www.ted.com, where he talks about the importance of intuitive design. Carson expresses how schools are shying away from teaching design through intuition because it is difficult to “quantify” intuition. In this video he elaborates about the importance of intuition by examining a quote by Albert Einstein: “The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution just comes to you and you don’t know from where or why.” Carson shows a design he created that incorporates this quote. This design is a great example of the kind of work that Carson specializes in. Text is laid over a blurred and distorted background. This text is also highly distorted. The words are not in alignment and they are different fonts, sizes, and colors. They blur out of focus in some points, and are in sharp focus and contrast in others. He selects a few strong words such as “leap” and “solution” to pop out at the viewer, so they immediately feel the emotions he wants them to. The distorted images and text that Carson uses can be predominately categorized as the grunge look, the style of art that is purposefully disheveled, discordant, and ‘dirty’ looking.
One of Carson’s works (Design A) is perfect example of his grunge typographic style. The background is a photograph of a man’s legs from the knees down to his feet. He is wearing a business suit and standing on a plain, salmon colored floor that has been rendered to look somewhat stained and dirty. The photograph has also been brought down to a medium to low chroma, yet there is still sharp contrast between the pink floor and the man’s black shoes. There is something off-putting about the stance of the businessman. Looking at his body language, you can tell that he’s not conveying confidence. His legs are relatively close together, and his feet are pointing inward. It’s a very awkward position. It feels like the man is trying to make an excuse for his own weak existence.
The text at the bottom of the design reflects his typographic style talked about earlier in this paper. It is the same phrase: “what’s all this noise about anyway?” repeated, but there is no sense of order. The font size erratically changes, the repeated phrase is cut into fragments, and pieces of the text are cut off by the margins. As mentioned before, Carson chooses a select few words to serve as focal points. The large emboldened “noise” and the boxed “anyway?” are such examples. It is not clear exactly what this design is trying to convey. The image and text do not seem to be all that related. The thing they do share, however, is the grungy quality that produces an uneasiness in the viewer.
Another one of Carson’s designs (Design B) consists of a two-page spread detailing mostly text. Unlike the piece analyzed previously, this design has no background image. This presents Carson with more of a challenge since he has to capture his viewer with only typography. The first thing the viewer notices is the word “raw” printed in huge red letters across the two pages. Carson’s grunge style is exemplified through this word alone. First of all, the word “raw” is a powerful one with several connotations that lend to the central theme of disorder and spontaneity. The letters are rendered to resemble worn paint on the side of an old wooden billboard. The edges of the letters are speckled, implying that the paint is slowly flaking off. He makes the word a little more disheveled by applying a slight break and shift down the horizontal middle of the word. The red “raw” stands out on the damaged-looking background with a smattering of jumbled letters, words, and imperfections. Overall, the immediate emotion Carson is trying to illicit in the viewer is one of edgy intrigue.
Sources:
· http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/?dcdc=top/s
· “David Carson on Design + Discovery”, http://www.ted.com/talks/david_carson_on_design.html
· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_(graphic_designer)
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