David Carson

1. Milton Glaser
2. Paul Rand
3. Saul Bass
4. Massimo Vignelli
5. David Carson

6. Stefan Sagmeister
7. Herb Lubalin
8 Tibor Kalman
9. Paula Scher
10.Margo Chase

According to the Graphic Design USA magazine, David Carson is one of the top most influential graphic designers of the era. He is considered the "Billy Idol of the graphic design" and a "popularizer." (Steven Heller)
Words mixed together in an odd way, overlapping each other with a mix of lower case and capitalized letters and sometimes blurred perfectly describe Carson's style. With little or no education in the design area, David Carson recognized what the audience was looking for and rapidly moved up among the greatest designers of the age.
At the age of 24, he was designing two surfer magazines, being a surfer himself. He soon got involved with bigger companies. The goal of his work was not legibility but communication.



Carson believes that people today do not like, or have no time to read so he creates the images with the words that speak as an art form. As we learned this week in class,the media and advertising companies are greatly influenced by the teenage population, the biggest consumers on the market. Carson recognized the need and responded two this generation in a way that really worked. Beside the prints, the designer also works with moving images and finds them more interesting. Carson has his own studios in New York and Virgin Islands and some of his clients are Quicksilver, Nike, Nine Inch Nails and Neutrogena.


Even though well known and well respected by some, he was considered a designer who is doing everything wrong and was not accepted by design communities. The fact that Carson believes in making beautiful art by questioning all the rules, pissed off lots of educated designers. But, he moves to Charleston, and he disappears from the big city and also from the main stage. And as a result to all the criticism, he writes a 460 page book about his work, and also a "fuck you to the industry," according to Burgoyne Patrick, Creative Review. And while some people are criticizing Carson indeed, others believe he plays an important role in the world of graphic design(Alexander Gelman).

"He converted an abstract, somewhat dry area into something a little sexy. Briefly."
(Lewis Blackwell, former editor of Creative Review)














Newsweek, February 26, 1996 , UNITED STATES EDITION, THE ARTS; Design; Pg. 64, 1067 words, BY PETER PLAGENS AND RAY SAWHILL
Burgoyne, Patrick. "Where is David Carson?." Creative Review 24.4 (2004): 46-9. Art Full Text. Web. 26 Oct. 2010.
Folio: the Magazine for Magazine Management 24.n4 (March 1, 1995): pp50(4). (1981 words)
http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/
http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/