David Carson Research

David Carson:
David Carson (born 1954) is an American graphic designer, art director and surfer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design and use of experimental typography. He was the art director for the magazine 'Ray Gun', in which he employed much of the typographic and layout style for which he is known.

David often distorts his typography or breaks it up or does something unusual. None of his designs feature plain text, in the same colour and font size in a justified arrangement.

Here the word 'legibility' is broken up with kerning spaces that vary after each letter. The font colour is white on a background of black so it stands out. This is known as reverse type. The background is actually made up of black text in a small font so its quite compact and close to a solid fill. The text is ragged right left but isn't centred. Above and below this is more text in a smaller font. Above is black text and below is white text on a solid black background. Both are separated by a vertical line after every character, including spaces. Above is black lines to break up the white background and below are white lines to break up the black background. This also makes you stutter as you read it and emphasises the message.  

 

This design features centred text that is ragged right left. The actual typeface is very slim and quite tall. This is contradicted by the enclosed loops found on the letters 'b' and 'a' that are filled in. The fill colour is a dark grey whereas the text is in fact black. Therefore I don't think this is part of the typeface but just added on top. Also the vertex's and apex's on the letters 'w' and 'n' are thicker, which stands out clearly amongst the thin strokes on all the other letters. Another thing I noticed is there is no line spacing, for example the word 'black' sits on top of 'swan' and actually makes contact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a double page spread from a magazine. The text bleeds from the left page to the right. The text on the left page is white so it stands out against the dark photo in the background (this is known s reverse type). However the background does not continue onto the right page with the text. The background on the right page is white meaning the text wont be seen on it. Therefore the text on the right page is black. This change doesn't happen conveniently between words in a sentence, like 'American Airlines',

 

it happens halfway through the letter 'u' in the word 'bounce' which some may find makes the word difficult to read. Here David changes the font size of each word and in some cases each letter. Also the letters don't share a base line, some words are vertical, some are horizontal, and in the word 'bounce' the first three letters start at a different height almost as if they're actually bouncing.