Who is David Carson? Good question. David Carson is considered one of the most successful and most influential graphic designers of the latter part of the 20th century. His work is characterized by unusual and unexpected experimentation with typography, ranging from what type of font to use to embellish an article, to which direction to place the chosen font. Love him or hate him (and the population in both camps is high) there is no escaping the simple fact that his typographic layouts and designs have consistently made viewers look more closely at what is supposed to be seen and read (even if they can't quite figure out exactly how to read it).
Born September 8, 1952 in Corpus Christi, Texas, Carson was raised primarily in New York City (“David Carson” 1). Throughout his young life, he and his family traveled extensively, from Puerto Rico to the West Indies (“David Carson” 1). During the 1980s, he graduated from San Diego state university, earning his BFA in Sociology, which he went on to teach to high school students (“Biography” 1). In 1983 Carson went to Switzerland; while there, he took a three-week workshop that happened to be taught by his influence, Hans Rudolph Lutz, who also experimented heavily with typography (“David Carson” 1). That workshop is essentially the extent of his “official” graphic design training. As Carson has explained, his methods and design tactics came from this lack of formal training: “I had a loose, intuitive, no-formal-training kind of approach and suddenly I had this audience with Beach Culture and Ray Gun that wanted an experimental, open, different approach. That lent itself to the way I worked, the way I saw things” (Blackwell). This approach led to his jobs as art director at Transworld Skateboarding, Beach Culture and Ray Gun magazines throughout the 1980s and 1990s (“David Carson” 1). These small magazines, which focused on subcultures of America, namely skateboarding, surfing, and alternative or unknown musicians and bands (respectively) were the perfect places for Carson to develop and exhibit his flair for the non-traditional.
