David Carson and Legibility

Today in class, a PowerPoint was given on typography and instantly I recognised one of the first photographs by David Carson. Last year in history of graphic design course, we had to pick a graphic artist and for our final assignment we had to mimic their work. I was instantly attracted to Carson’s work because it was very unusual and I couldn’t get past the fact that a lot of his work was illegible. I loved how he rejects the traditional rules of design when dealing with page layouts, use of text and images. To me this concept was foreign to me because all the way through school we were always taught the importance of legibility. After researching Carson’s work I learned that it doesn’t always matter if text is legible. David’s titles are often spread across a whole page, or erratically across images, or in expressive sequences. Carson emerged into the graphic design industry by having his text in irregular shapes, making it hard for viewers to decipher his work by slicing away parts of the letters. David loves to play with text columns to make them the width of the page and eliminate gutters between columns.

I found his work to be very inspiration and very fun to mimic because I was allowed to break away from traditional rules that we were taught in school. I made a series of posters representing his work. I noticed that most of the time Carson’s work has connections between the title and the image. I got the inspiration to make the “criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer” poster by relating the text and the image. I came across one of his previous works titled “Hanging on Carmine Street”, where the text was “hung” on the page and is both upsides down and spaced out. I decided to follow this format, so I picked a quote of his and then I decided to make the text look as if it had been painted through with white paint. The text is shown to have a degree of illegibility from the strokes through the words.

Another thing I learned and applied to my work was inspired by a two different pieces of his work. I came across where on the left page was a quote by C.G Jung. The first and last letter of each word is not capitalized but the size o the text had been increased. I took this method of his and used another quote by David and mimicked his technique. On the right page, there was an image representing the quote he had used. I made an image that corresponded with Carson’s quote by imitating another poster by him, which was very similar to the one you had in the PowerPoint with all the words layered on top of each other. The poster shows a bunch of words repeated continuously in a given area until it became illegible and clustered. Then on top of the clutter of text with white text Carson brilliantly wrote the quote on top. I imitated this concept by repeating the word “commercial” until almost becoming illegible, layering on top of a toilet. Then on top of the clutter of text I added the word “commercials” in white text to make the concept clearer.

Click for larger file of this one...

I know his concept of legibility doesn’t necessarily fit into all projects, but whenever I get a chance I use Carson’s work for inspiration because I really like the idea of not always following rules. With not having rules to follow, I often find I can produce a better piece of art because I am not confined to different guidelines and rules and having to opportunity to just go with it.