ROXY David Carson's Quote

"It’s not about knowing all the gimmicks and photo tricks. If you haven’t got the eye, no program will give it to you.”

David Carson

When I was looking through the list of possible quotes we could chose from, this was the quote that stood out to me the most. I have believed this idea for most of my life, way before I had even heard of the quote or knew whom David Carson was.

I have always thought that if you didn’t have any talent or eye or colours, patterns, space or design, no teacher or book is ever going to be able to teach you how to be creative or create great designs. These things are natural talents, not some technique that can be taught to anyone. Yes, graphic designers use such programs as Illustrator and Photoshop to create their art but these are simply tools. If you were to teach the same techniques to someone with no artistic skills, the chances of their artwork being on the same par as the graphic designers are very small.

David Carson himself is an excellent example for this quote. Carson wasn’t educated or taught graphic design or typography. He even “broke all the rules” of graphic design. He had natural talent. He had an eye for design.

I believe David Carson’s thinking behind the quote is the same – or very similar - as my idea.

- Roxy

ROXY Magazine Design - David Carson

Having worked as a sociology teacher and professional surfer in the late 1970s, he art directed various music, skateboarding and surfing magazines through the 1980s. As art director of surfing magazines and more famously style magazine Ray Gun (1992-5), Carson came to worldwide attention. His layouts featured distortions or mixes of 'vernacular' typefaces and fractured imagery, rendering them almost illegible. Indeed, his maxim of the 'end of print' questioned the role of type in the emergent age of digital design, following on from California New Wave and coinciding with experiments at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Ray Gun made Carson very well-known and attracted new admirers to his work. In this period, publications such as the New York Times (May 1994) and Newsweek (1996) featured Carson and increased his publicity greatly.

http://www.raygun.com/
http://www.arsgrafik.com/david-carson/
http://www.wikipedia.org/

David Carson

David Carson is a graphic designer best known for his innovative magazine design and use of experimental typography. He was the art director for the magazine Ray Gun and Transworld Skateboarding magazine. Carson was perhaps the most influential graphic designer of the nineties.


By the late eighties he had developed his signature style, using "dirty" type and non-mainstream photographic techniques. He would later be dubbed the "father of grunge."


To the left you can see a page he designed for the Ray Gun Magazine.





Like Neville Brody, typographer and graphic designer David Carson became influential in the late 1980's and 1990s for experimental typeface designs. David Carson's designs were featured heavily in surfing and skateboarding magazines.

A tribute to other self-taught designers, David Carson broke most of the rules of design and typography, a process that was made easy with the use of desk top publishing programs, such as Pagemaker, QuarkXpress and Illustrator. He experimented with overlapping and distorted fonts and intermixed these with striking photographic images.



To view a list of Carson's book's, click here.

http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_%28graphic_designer%29
http://www.designtalkboard.com/design-articles/famous-designers.php