In 1990 David Carson shocked the design community with the first issue of the surf magazine, "Beach Culture." Carson and his team of excellent illustrators (including Geof Kern, Marshall Arisman, and Milton Glaser) tested the tolerance and imagination of a mainstream...
[more]In 1990 David Carson shocked the design community with the first issue of the surf magazine, "Beach Culture." Carson and his team of excellent illustrators (including Geof Kern, Marshall Arisman, and Milton Glaser) tested the tolerance and imagination of a mainstream niche audience. Even the critics were surprised that a readership made up of surfers was willing to wade through the sometimes undecipherable text and unidentifiable visuals.
The confusion over whether "Beach Culture" was a surf magazine or a culture/art magazine caused many advertisers to drop out; however, there was still enough funding to continue publication. In the five issues that followed, Carson spun an even more intricate web of chaos. In one issue, he created perplexing page numbers that were larger than the headline. He changed the order of the pages but kept each original page number in place because, as he said, "I happened to like it there." Readers had to trust that as they read they would somehow be guided in a logical, sequential order.
Carson continued to intrigue the design community with spread-out, inverted, mixed-font type in both advertisements and magazine layouts for other clients, including Raygun Magazine, MCI, Ray-Ban, and Jaguar. He set words in oddly mixed capitals and lowercase letters, some blurred, others overlaid, still others stuffed into small, inclined boxes. As one observer noted, Carson shattered "the Modernist grid [that] subverts the personality of the designer to the primacy of the corporate." That meant eliminating the nice, the clean, and the readable in favor of scattered headlines and illegible text across overlapping photos. Carson explains: "Overall people are reading less. I'm just trying to visually entice them to read."
His Raygun layouts are typical of his recent magazine work, with more daredevil design stunts like dripped ink and lines of type that extend across two pages. Once he had two separate articles run together simultaneously, and a Beastie Boys cover was left blank except for the two inches at the top that wouldn't be obscured by other magazines at the newsstand. Much of his work is featured in "The End of Print: The Graphic Design of David Carson" (Chronicle). Examples of his ongoing production can be found in the quarterly publication, Speak.
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