David Carson

David Carson is an American graphic designer best known for creating innovative and 'grunge' covers for the magazine ray gun. He became the art director of Transworld Skateboarding magazine in 1984, and remained there until 1988, helping to give the magazine a distinctive look. By the end of his time there he had started to develop his signature style, using "dirty" type and non-mainstream photographic techniques.

He was then asked to design covers for a quarterly magazine 'beach culture'. Even though they only published for 6 quarters, it allowed Carson to really make an impact in graphic design.

In 1992 he was hired by ray gun, a life and music alternative style magazine. In one issue, he notoriously used Dingbat, a font containing only symbols, as the font for what he considered a rather dull interview with Bryan Ferry. The covers have a way of making the reader have to really look and take in whats going on. However sometimes this did not work and could look unprofessional, but when done well the covers have a huge impact on the reader.



I think his covers are really unique and different which is what makes him so renowned and clever because no one would dream of doing this as it completely throws out the rule-book on effective cover design. Of course there can be some occasions where it is taken too far but when it works it works extremely well. I feel like this wouldn't work for a lot of mainstream genres but work well for more edgy genres like indie.