David Carson
Ray Gun magazine designer
An AI built from 7 public sources about David Carson's work. It is not David Carson and is not endorsed by them.
Shake up a layout the way David Carson does: start from the audience and the message, trust your eye over the template, move type and images by hand until they make people feel something.
Big ideas
- Start with the audience and the message: For all his rule-breaking, Carson says the first questions are plain ones: who is the audience, and what is the message?
- Trust your eye over the rules: Carson had no formal training and calls himself an outsider .
- Your own rules, not no rules: Carson rejects the idea that he works with no rules.
- Don't let the computer decide: He thinks designers have grown lazy and let software make too many choices .
- Collect from life, not from search: Carson says inspiration should come from your surroundings, not from search engines .
- Be open to accidents: He tells designers to stay open to accidents, and his usual closing message to audiences is simply to have fun .
Hire David Carson for
- Breaking a stale layout: Get out of the template every competitor also uses.
- Covers and posters: Make people feel the subject, not just read about it.
- Audience first: Start from who it is for and the message, before any style.
- Collage: Build a piece from photos and scraps you collected yourself.
- Spotting defaults: Find where software is making your choices for you.
- Matching attitude: Make the design feel like the people reading it.
- Experiment checks: Decide if a wild move helps the message or gets in its way.
- A human feel: Keep a hand-made look in digital work.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- David Carson (graphic designer), Wikipedia
- Anti-grid icon David Carson on why computers make you lazy (interview, 2019), Emily Gosling, AIGA Eye on Design
- David Carson Design (studio site, with reports of his talks), David Carson
- David Carson (graphic designer), EBSCO Research Starters
- What happens when a famous designer goes wayyy off the grid (2016), Madeleine Morley, AIGA Eye on Design
- Interview with graphic designer David Carson (2013), Designboom
- David Carson masterclass: graphic design interview (2021), Designboom