David Carson
American Graphic Designer
David Carson, (born September 8, 1955, Corpus Christi, Texas) American graphic designer, Whose unconventional style revolutionized visual communication in the 1990s.
Carson came to graphic design relatively late in life. He was a competitive surfer, ranked eighth in the world and a high-school teacher, when he enrolled in a two-week commercial design class. Discovering a new calling he briefly enrolled at a commercial art school before working as a designer at a small surfer magazine, Self, and Musician. He then spent four years as a part-time designer for the magazine Transworld Skateboarding, which enabled him to experiment. His characteristic chaotic spreads with overlapped photos and mixed altered type fonts drew both admirers and detractors. Photographer Albert Watson said ” He uses type the way a painter uses paint, to create emotion, express ideas.” Others felt that it fractured the presentation, obscured the message it carried.
In 1989 Carson became art director at the magazine Beach Culture. Although he produced onlv six issues before the journal folded, his work there earned him more than 150 design awards. By that time, Carson’s work had caught the eye of Marvin Scott Jarrett, publisher of the alternative- music magazine Ray Gun, and he hired Carson as art director in 1992. Over the next three years, with the help of Carson’s radical design vision, Ray Gun’s circulation tripled. Because Carson’s work clearly appealed to a youthful readership, corporations such as Nike and Levi Strauss & Co. commissioned him to design print ads, and he also began directing television commercials.
