David Carson

David Carson:
Born 8 September 1952 in Corpus Christi. Since the age of four has lived in New York, although traveled extensively with his family.
First actual contact with Graphic Design was in 1980 at the University of Arizona. He attended San Diego State University as well as the Oregon College of Commercial Art.
Carson was working towards a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology where he went to Switzerland and attended a three week workshop in Graphic Design.
Carson owns two studios: Del Mar California and one in Zurich.

• Became well known for his inventive graphics in the 90s.
• Worked as a Sociology teacher and professional surfer in the late 70s. Art directed various music, skateboarding and surfing magazine through the 1980s.
• By the late 80s Carson had developed his signature style, using 'dirty' type and non mainstream photographic techniques. Later he would be named "father of grunge".
• Became art director of Transworld Skateboarding magazine.
• Professional surfer - 9th best in the world.
• Ray Gun, a magazine of international standards which had music and lifestyle as its subject.
• 1995 Carson founded his own studio, David Carson Design, NY
• During the years 1995-98 Carson was attracting and doing work for big companies such as Pepsi, Ray Ban, Nike, Microsoft, Budweiser, Giorgio Armani, NBC, American Airlines and Levi Strauss to name a few.
• 2000 saw Carson opening a studio in South Carolina.
• 2004 Carson became creative director of Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston.
• He took photography and type and manipulated and twisted them together and on some level confusing the message but in reality he was to draw the eyes of the viewer deeper within the composition.

During the period of 1989-2004, Carson has won 170 awards for his work in Graphic Design.

• Best Overall Design, Society of Publications Designers NY
• Cover of the Year, Society of Publications Designers NY
• Award for Best Use of Photography in Graphic Design
• Designer of the Year 1998, International Centre of Photography
• Designer of the Year 1999, International Centre of Photography
• Master of Typography, Graphics Magazine NY
• The most famous graphic designer on the planet, April 2004 - London Creative Review magazine

1995 first book published "End of Print". 200,000 copies or more sold.
Second book "2nd Sight" followed in 1997.
1998 Worked with Harvard Professor on documentary "The Art and Discipline of Creativity".
1999 third book published "Fhotografiks"
2000 fourth book "Trek".

In the past few years, Carson has branched out into film and television to direct commercials and videos.

Art director for Beach Culture, another surfing magazine, although only six issues of this magazine were published. The magazine earned him over 100 design awards.

1993 Carson started the "Garage Fonts" digital type foundary as a vehicle to distribute the fonts used in Ray Gun Magazine.

Style Guide

Body copy and how I feel about it.

This exercise was to pick 10 different bodycopy typefaces and write our name and described how it makes us feel.

Edited Posters

After listening to the comments and feedback from the critique yesterday, I corrected the things that needed changing, above is the next version of my elderly exercise poster.

Once again I took on board the comments that were made about the poster and made the changes accordingly. The changes I feel were positive and made the posters stronger.

Posters - InDesign

I tried to keep it simple, with the use of type to compliment the image, I also tried to use colours that were already in the image.

Although this poster isn't the correct size, to me it is a very powerful message portraying the fallen soldier. Maybe the colour of the type needs to be different.

This poster shows a proud young soldier, he was willing to go to war, to fight for freedom but to also fight for the new commonwealth.

I wanted to make this poster a bit more colourful, I hoped it would draw attention to the message, possibly a different display type could have been used.

Abstract Art - Playing with Textures

These pieces were done in Illustrator then taken into Photoshop, where I asked Ani to show me how to put texture into them. The original concepts came from IDN, I thought that they would be easy to create, maybe with more experience but the overall finished pieces now have that depth that they were lacking before.

Hand drawn piece for Zine

This piece was inspired by a image that I found in IDN, I liked the way the letter M seems to stand out in the foreground. I love drawing things like this by hand, I find it very soothing.