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branding

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From my hotel room in Frankfurt.

 
Right side remainds me of Rothko a bit (1999). Digital print from 35mm photograph on archival paper by David Carson
 
Branding Carson.What do you do next when you’re one of the world’s most famous graphic designers? Teal Triggs looks at David Carson’s transformation from designer to digital artist.
 
from”Graphics International” Issue 88, 2001
 
The name of David Carson became synonymous with what was considered to be cutting-edge graphic design in the early1990s. His unmistakable ‘experimental’ editorial design work for lifestyle and music magazines such as Surfer, Transworld Skateboarding, Beach Culture, Blue and Ray Gun gained him worldwide acclaim, as did his television commercials for global corporations such as Nike, Pepsi and Microsoft. At the pinnacle of his popularity, Carson’s trademarks became a cold bottle of beer, a long queue of adoring fans (male and female) and a felt-tip marker, which heused for autographing anything from T-shirts to books. This was the graphic-designer-as-rock-star, living an itinerant life of wall-to-wall airport lounges, luxury hotel rooms and limousines-before Carson, only British designer Neville Brody had come close to occupying such a rarefied position. When Brody met Carson in 1994 for Creative Review’s now famous Face to Face interview and remarked that for him, Carson’s work represented the ‘end of print’, the challenge was set. As the 1990s played out, Carson took ‘the end of print’ as his mantra, using it as the title for one of the most successful design books of all time and, in its wake, becoming the focus of numerous heated typo/graphic debates. But what else could be expected from someone whose work teeters precariously between the usually well-defined bound-aries of art and graphic design?
 
Some six years after The End of Print was first published, David Carson is still managing to maintain his controversial position.While he is no stranger to exhibiting in museums abroad, appearing as part of a group show held in a commercially led fine-art gallery is somewhat different. The venue is the Marlborough Fine Art Gallery, located in one of London’s more expensive shopping districts. The show is titled “CD:1,Contemporary Dialogue: 1″, and features the work of six recent fine-art graduates from the RCA and Goldsmith’s. These are painters and sculptors who, the gallery proclaims, “eschew the current trend towards video and installation.” Equally, the gallery sees David Carson’s inclusion in this show as breaking from the norm, as he is neither British norart-college trained. However, he does represent the gallery’s continued interest in promoting graphic art-a tradition that began in the 1950s. At the same time, despite being a household name in graphic design, David Carson is virtually unknown withhim the contemporary British art world.
 
Nicola Togneri, who represents Marlborough Fine Art, comments that showing the work of graphic designers in an art gallery has recently become much more acceptable. She explains: “The subject matter of much of David’s work appeals to a younger audience. He is really very much about the ‘now’” Although he still commands a tremendous amount of respect from his fellow designers, it is debatable whether Carson’s work would be considered by them to be anything remotely resembling ‘cutting-edge’. By including him among these up-and-coming British artists, the gallery hopes to introduce Carson to a new audience of art aficionados. In so doing, it hopes to prompt some sort of dialogue about exactly what is happening “now”-be it in the discipline of fine art or graphic design.
 
In either case, the work on show suggests that Carson is far from rejecting the roots of his early experimental design work. Here, in a series of letter press prints, overprited posters, press proofs and photographic prints, Carson’s interest in the process of making and collecting are still very much in evidence. Visually, this work is not so very different from the early image-making he did for Ray Gun-the collages constructed out of elements of found paper, printed graphic ephemera or blurred photographs that highlight the graphic minutiae of the street. Immaculee Conception (2001), for example, is both a found poster as well as an experimental surface for Carson’s overprinting of red-inked typographic forms. One of the more interesting pieces in the show, the screenprint plays upon what might be read as a provocative juxtaposition of David Carson’s name with an engraving of a French mid-19th century Madonna, enshrined by plump cherubs.
 
The majority of the work on show is not really new, either in terms or its content or direction. For example, some of the photographs have already been published in Carson’s book Fotografiks, including From my Hotel, Frankfult. Right Side reminds me of Rothko, a bit. (1999), Lights (1999) and New York Subway. On the Way to Coney Island (1999). The subject of the letterpress work is also familiar. Forming a sort of typographic variation on a theme, David Carson’s name appears repeatedly as a visual element on psters advertising workshops such as those held at the Ecole Cantonaled’Art de Lausanne, Switzerland. Likewise, the recycling of letterforms continues in his more recent experimental letterpress work. Carson suggests that this was a matter of convenience: “The type just happened to be around.” Although the text was familiar, the design process involved in these overprinted pieces on found paper was not. Carson explains: “I spent time in Barcelona doing lithographic work on these big stone pieces, where you literally got up there, put the paint on and did the whole thing. I’ve come late to this process, but I found it fascinating. I wouldn’t say this is the new work. The new work is the old work, in a sense. It’s discovering a new technique, and it’s moving into fine art.”
 
What is missing, in this ‘new’ old work, however, is the crucial context of the printed page. While a well-established commercial gallery space does offer a new place for it to be viewed, Carson’s narrative structure is subsequently reduced to a selection of single, framed, limited-edition images. Now they appear as isolated moments that say more about Carson and his process of working (and his travels) than they do about the substance of his experience. This may be no bad thing, especially as the formality of the images’ composition and their colour still resonate. But is this enough to warrant placing them on a gallery wall? What has always been successful about Carson’s work as a graphic designer is his ability to integrate image and text in an interesting, if not questionable, fashion. Philip Meggs writes in Fotografiks: “Designers see the page, not the photograph, as the locus of their creative enterprise David Carson formed attitudes about this visual/verbal interface and its potential for expression.” In many ways, for Carson to remove the photograph from its basic context further problematises the work.
 
Which brings us back to the designer as artist, or in this case the artist as designer. Intuition still forms the basis for much of Carson’s image-making. Upon reflection, Carson notes: “The early magazine work was very subjective, reacting to something I had just read, music I listened to, or people I met. Now I am just interpreting that and hopefully reinforcing it’s Ideally, someone would buy my work because it ‘spoke’ to them in some way.” However, Carson is quick to point out that unlike graphic designers, fine artists are not continually asked to justify their work: “People complain that ‘there is no real concept’ or say that ‘it just falls together’. In certain places maybe that is okay, but I think this is where fine artists can pull it off.”
 
In keeping with the conventions of fine-art practice, every print and photograph in the gallery is signed. And, in combination with the repeated use of his name in the works themselves, there is little doubt that this is a branding exercise. Togneri admits: “We are working with a brand identity here. It is high quality, but it is a new brand.” Well, for the art world, maybe. In the age of Naomi Klein’s No Logo, and an ever-increasing publicscepticism towards brands, Carson is a risky prospect. He knows he hasn’t made it quite yet as an ‘artist’ and is finding the lack of feedback disturbing. This was evident on the night of the Gallery’s private view, where Carson remarked: “It is strange to be so anonymous.”
 
So it is no surprise, then, when Carson eventually returns to the subject of his commercial work. His latest project is The Book of Probes, which is a collection of aphorisms and excerpts from of aphorisms and excerpts from Marshall Mcluhan’s own illustrious, albeit controversial career. Carson is the art director and designer on the project and shares a cover credit. He describes the opening sequence: “The book starts out with a big long section of nothing but photographs I’ve taken of cactuses in the desert.” Is this ‘the book as art gallery’?
 
Carson is clearly a Mcluhan fan and is keen to promote this 672-page achievement, which skilfully combines his love of the photographic image and penchant for typographic experimentation. Carson points out that Probes is about introducing McLuhan to a whole new generation of readers in an accessible way. “The book will give some intriguing quotes that look interesting visually For fans who have had some difficulty in reading McLuhan from cover to cover, we’ve created a primer, a teaser of some different thoughts.” The sources of the quotations are listed at the back for those who want to find out more. The book is classic Carson: the dialogue moves seamlessly between designer, author and reader.
 
Exactly what the Marlborough Fine Art Gallery intends the ‘contemporary dialogue’ with Carson to be, is up for grabs. Those who read the design press won’t easily forget the David Carson who has been at the centre of numerous graphic authorship debates. Is Carson attempting to legitimise his seemingly art-based design practice by moving into a gallery context? Or is this merely the next logical step in his brilliant career?
He has already been part of a group of radical designers who unwittingly began to define a visual landscape for the consumer-based youth culture in the 1990s. Is he trying to do the same in the art world of the 21st century?
 


Spreads from The Book of Probes


problem solvers

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archive: review-problem solvers: Problem solvers, priests and pests
 
Impressions from David Carson, famed designer of letters tattered, toppled and tumbled
 
BY HANS KLEEFELD
 
“Don’t mistake legibility for communication” “You can’t not communicate.” If you’re familiar with these observations, you’ll know of David Carson, and you’ll know his work-for the magazines Ray Gun, Surfer and Beach Culture; for Armani and Quiksilver fashions; for Fox television. In Canada, Carson had a hand in the Bank of Montreal’s Fingerprint and the Leap Batteries campaigns.
 
If you’ve never encountered the man, pity. He’s got a laid-back sense of humour about what he does, and the graphic design profession generally, which goes a long way to defuse irritation that conservative type practitioners may feel towards Carson’s sometimes grating graphics. Anyway, he recently had and audience at the Design Exchange in Toronto laughing through most of his presentation.
 
Some of the hilarity was triggered by slides of graffiti and inadvertently humorous random graphics that Carson apparently tracks down and records in search of inspiration. This, he suggests, is what designers should observe, rather than our over each other’s work in design magazines and annuals.
 
Particularly intriguing were several shots of torn posters revealing odd details of imagery from previous postings beneath. Accidental though such effects are, they nevertheless encourage viewers to find some meaning in them. David Carson is not the only one who seems thus “life-focused,” but maybe he is exploiting it more astutely than others.
 
If one were to put graphic designers into categories, there might be three: problem solvers, priests and pests.
 
Problem solvers make up the majority. Whether conservative or cool in their work, they quietly do their stuff for countless corporations’ causes. They’re the unsung heroes behind messages competently fashioned in a spirit once defined by Herb Lubalin, well-known NewYork type-whizin his day, as: The best typography never gets noticed.
 
Priests, then, are a select few individuals who a combination of circumstances has elevated to professional luminosity. Priests generally become what they are through irreverent work which many problem solvers wished they’d done, but didn’t have the nerve to generate and sell; and of course, through unabashed self-promotion. David Carson, like Britain’s Neville Brody and Canada’s Bruce Mau, is a member of that group, which seems to unfailingly inspire some while aggravating others.
 
Pests, finally, are hordes of desktop meddlers whose software prowess is surpassed only by their soft grasp of type and design basics-common sense rules that problem solvers follow conscientiously, and that priests like to break with cheerful vigor. Pests make up a murky mass, best ignored-if it weren’t for the dread prospect that pests may unwittingly take us one step closer to virtual design and Mclayouts.
 
Why do designers choose to not only bend, but break traditions? Are they shooting themselves in the foot? Or are they doing both for their clients and their clients’ audiences a valuable service?
 
Consider here Carson’s first-quoted statement: don’t mistake legibility for communication. Most problem solvers’ communication efforts are decidedly driven by legibility objectives-make brand names and product benefits clearer, bigger, bolder. Show and tell everything. That’s fine in theory and by itself. But what if all competitors, and a zillion other sellers do the same? Any chance that viewers may get bored out of their skulls by endless overkill? look around and you may notice a nation of scanners, who flip-flip-flip through pages or channels. For those living in a hurry, is legibility really a hot commodity?
 
Communication implies engagement. Marketing gurus endlessly acclaim emotional involvement as the road to consumers’ minds, hearts and wallets. What if it’s no longer possible to seriously engage with overplayed, tried-and-trusted formats? David Carson seems to suggest that you now have to be very different to be noticed and to penetrate viewers’ consciousness. That observation, at least, clearly has merit.
 
Carson’s second-quoted statement-you can’t not communicate-is equally provocative. At first glance, it seems to merely state the obvious. But what if it refers to what you don’t show or tell? What if absence of daring visuals signals lack of spirit; what if the obvious, no matter how well-designed in its own right, sends a message of conformity?
 
What wants to be read at length obviously should at least be fairly legible. Even Carson’s own Web site bio (at www.davidcarsondesign.com) is straight lower case sans serif type without font mixes (though the lines are pretty long and packed close); but then the bulk of graphic deisgn communication, both in print or video, operates more and more in sight-and soundbite fashion, anyway. Here David Carson’s ground-breaking kaleidoscopic, visually pulsating imagery presents, if not a standard, then at least a reference that may well inspire others to search for new ways to put messages across.
 
HANS KLEEFELD is a creative director at Watt International in Toronto.

A Hero of Deconstruction

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archive: review-A Hero of Deconstruction: A Hero of Deconstruction
 
from The London Times Sunday magazine
 
“David Carson printed a dull article as unfathomable symbols. Readers loved it, Lewis Blackwell explores the work of graphic design genius”
 
As you read this, David Carson is probably in a hotel room in a strange city somewhere preparing for yet another show. From New York to London, Brussels to New Orleans, the tour goes on. His lifestyle echoes that of a rock star, or religious cult leader. But he is something more seminal to this media-saturated age of ours. Carson is a graphic designer.
 
Once this job description had all the glamour of the technician that it largely described-someone who helped things appear on the right bit of paper. But graphics has changed. In the Eighties, the designer rose to prominence, a figure invested with the authority to remake the modern world.
 
In their work designers celebrated the Self, trumpeted individualism and led the obsession for consumerables whose value was multiplied through a label. Designer jeans, designer perfume, designer restaurants-the hand or signature of the designer-creator came to be an important (if often spurious) mark of quality. In the past few years, we may have dismissed Eighties style, but there seems little lessening of the desire for creative heroes. In an age when values are at best questioned, at worst entirely shot away, those who can make up their own rules and pitch them out there have the firm basis of a career. Appearance is everything. Until you buy a new one.
 
Graphic design, which didn’t quite peak in the Eighties, has arrived. Now that everybody has an ironic post-modernist take on their information sources, the graphic designer is pitched as high priest at the altar of mass-communication. Press conferences are held to launch minor tweakings of corporate logos, while lavish awards cram the calendar, showering honour on the makers of the media.
 
But fewcan hope to catch the wave as David Carson has done. Perhaps it is because he is a one-time professional surfer-reputedly reaching a peak of number eight in the world-that he seems to have an instinctive grasp of the forces behind the times. Perhaps it is also that he is almost entirely self-taught, and thus escaped having dinned into him the “right way of doing things” which inevitably congeals into dogma, the destiny of which is to be torn apart.
 
Carson has shown excellent timing and an ability to stay at the adge: from the early Eighties when he learnt how to design a magazine as he went along, knocking out a 200-page skateboarding magazine in the evenings after teaching at high school near San Diego, through the years of catching attention with offbeat publishing, to the recent years of stardom and a queue of clients across print, advertising, television and film.
 
While rivals might question his success, and often speak cynically of Carson’s ability to get talked about, they have to admit he does have something-the indefinable eye. Even his enemies admit the man has talent. The distinct difference of Carson’s work, and its wildfire effect on the imagination of young designers, has ensured that he is applauded or attacked as the art director/designer of this era.
 
In the radical vision of Carson’s graphics, a generation of designers has a new creed to follow. This involves, to describe the work crudely, free-form pages and films, beautifully difficult-to-read typography, distressed images and eclectic multi-cultural sources of material, all working to spin a richly seductive form for his client’s communications-messages which range from the latest Microsoft poster campaign to the Giorgio Armani magazine, anti-smoking ads, short films , books and commercials.
 
Carson’s sold-out speaking tour coincides with the launch of Second Sight: grafik design after the end of print (Laurence King, f35 /f25), which attempts to reveal the theory behind the seemingly unruly nature of all this output. The first book on his work, The End Of Print , sold 120,000 copies worldwide-not enough to begin paying out the advance of a John Grisham novel, but unprecedented for a graphic design book.
 
As the author, or collaborator, on both books, I am scarcely the best person to assess their merit-but can at least claim an inside knowledge of their making and the motives of the man behind the work. With the first book, we unintentionally caught the vogue for “end-ism” (we were at the beginning of the rash of books titled “The End Of…”) , noting how the growth of media was changing print and how it was stimulating radical questions about what we read and how we want to see it. With the latest book we looked for the forces behind this design that runs so counter to the reasoning of traditional practice.
 
Carson is an intriguing mix of innocence and experience. He has a sociology degree and has worked in design for a decade. Yet he still displays remarkable gaps in his knowledge of design history, or indeed of some basic craft practices. Younger designers often assume he is a child of the digital era, where the technology invites play with type and images, but in fact his approach was forged before moving on to the computer. He spends time finding and saving junked materials, taking photographs, and playing with surfaces outside of the computer environment. His work has more in common with fine artists-notably Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Rothko-than it has with other designers. He only really uses one software program, whereas the typical young graphic designer tends to dip in and out of a handful.
 
Instead of having all the answers, Carson’s work is driven by asking questions. In an often highly self-conscious manner, his layouts and films are full of details that make you aware of the surface of the page or screen, make you aware of the medium and of its rules-rules which Carson takes as things to be twisted in his intuitive search for new ways of doing things.
 
This idea of intuition is at the core of the work. In a rejection of the rationalism behind Modernist design, he has embraced intuition as being a long-underrated virtue of creative work. In this he is tapping into a deeply unfashionable area of philosophy, one which connects with the quasi-spiritual approach of Henri Bergson at the turn of the century, and also links with the current vogue for Outsider Art, or Art Brut.
 
Carson is not expecting a warm reception from the “design industry” for such an attitude. With graphic designers often desperate to suggest to likely clients that their work is some kind of soft science, almost guaranteed to deliver measurable improvement in a company’s performance, the last thing they need is a contemporary design guru saying good design is at its best as a personal, gut-feeling, a mixing of self-expression into public messages.
 
But such words strike a deeply resonant chord with designers as yet free of corporate pressures. They can sense that Carson’s approach touches the very reason why they do the job in the first place: to try and shape the world in some way, so that it enriches life in a broader sense than just delivering results on a company’s bottom line.
 
For the general viewer-or perhaps you and I-the appeal of the work is, at first sight, simply that it is refreshingly different. He challenged conventions about readability and about page structure, even magazine structure. This leads to the removal of page numbering, the subversion of descriptive contents pages, even the abandonment of beginning at the beginning (one magazine started in the middle and worked out in both directions, with some articles ending on an associated internet site).
 
These were pyrotechnics of from, rarely supported by the content of what were otherwise fairly tame editorial products. In his frustration with yet another dull article in the magazine Ray Gun he went so far as to produce it in an entirely unreadable typeface of symbols. Interestingly, this caused no apparent backlash from readers, but only won more admiration.
 
In moving away from niche magazines and into the world of international advertising, and more heavyweight work, Carson is running the risk of losing control. His most influential magazine work came out of a process that saw him send the magazine to the printer without recourse to the editor or publisher. But such freedom is not possible when you are helping present a global brand to its marketplace in a dozen different languages, with a dozen different corporate divisions all bidding to make their mark.
 
Only in creating his own book, or in some of his smaller one-off jobs and teaching roles, dose Carson now get the kind of freedom that has turned on a generation of graphic designers. Whatever his next move, though, one thing is sure that he has been a major influence in creating a tidal force of change in the look and logic of contemporary graphics. Next time you like the look of something but can’t at first quite work out what it is saying, thank David Carson. Or not.
 
Lewis Blackwell is head of Getty Images.