David Carson

Having know about David Carson for a good few years I decided to look at him for this research brief. He is an American graphic designer / typographer who is probably most famous for his experimental typographical magazine Ray Gun. This magazine was all about alternative American Rock & Roll.

Here is just one example of the cover of RayGun and how Carson works. He uses multi layered typography, of all differing fonts and plays around with their positioning on the page. Often the text will become illegible or very difficult to follow. This comes down to one famous quote from Carson which states "Don't mistake legibility for communication". This basically describes his views on design.

For example, this piece was an interview that Carson did with Bryan Ferry for the magazine, that he found so dull that he set the entire thing in Zapf Dingbats. You may have had to decode it to understand any of it but his message reads loud and clear.

This poster for example has around 8 different fonts, all of differing weights and point sizes present in a very abstract manner, with disregard to a grid. Although this piece is slightly different to the main body of his work, as he often combines the experimental type with background images, a lot of which were very hard to decipher what exactly they were. This style was known as the "grunge typography" of which he was at the forefront.