David Carson Research Paper

670 Words2 Pages

Throughout history, countless artists and designers with evolutionary ideas have made extraordinary changes in the graphic design world. Without brave influences of courageous rebels like David Carson, graphic design would have seen little creative change in its history. Carson’s ideas and beliefs are incomparably inspiring. The important impacts he has made with his ideas have stemmed from his fearless creativity; though possibly furthermore basic, ideas that have stemmed from the influences that came before him.
The last quarter of the twentieth century gave way for an “irrevocable change” in graphic design with the explosive growth of the Internet, allowing a “former professional surfer and schoolteacher” an outlet for his previously unexpressed, …show more content…

Meggs’ History of Graphic Design explains that postmodernism “sent shock waves through the design establishment,” challenging the order and clarity of modern design (461). The combination of Carson’s experimental nature and this postmodern design allowed for a change in the mainstream design used as communication. Carson embraced many postmodern ideas, such as to place a form in a space because it “‘feels right rather than to fulfill a rational communicative need” (Meggs 460, 461). This approach to communication in the 1970’s postmodernism movement, as explained by Meggs, allowed the designer to become “an artist performing before an audience with the bravura of a street musician.” The audience is either captivated or passes on. Carson understood this concept of organized individualism necessary to attract attention in an expanding and saturated advertising …show more content…

Carson’s designs are cultivated from his most basic belief of communication over legibility, as stated in his TED Talk , Design and Discovery: “Just because something's legible doesn't mean it communicates. More importantly, it doesn't mean it communicates the right thing.” Although this belief flouted the previous foundation of design, it also gave Carson means to experiment innovative, sometimes rejected, beliefs without limitation. While his exploration in editorial design served as powerful inspiration to many young designers, he detracted many others who believed he was crossing the line between order and chaos. Carson understood layout design to be a mechanism of art forming to express the information, but not to be as informative as the article itself. He believed that each element, the information and the aesthetic, to be cohesive while keeping separate visual identities. His appreciation for a human’s need to create opinion as well as human nature’s captivation with an opportunity to decipher a message was a tool that became his strategy for success. Carson explains another of his fundamental ideas in his Ted conference of Design and Discovery expressing his respect for something more than just the rudimentary, informational message in a work: “I'm a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that's sent before somebody begins to

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