MAGAZINE COVER
-DAVID CARSON
BRIEF: Designing a magazine front back cover and a spread that defines the style of a graphic designer- DAVID CARSON
DAVID CARSON is a graphic designer, art director and surfer. His work for the magazines beach culture in the 1990s brought a new approach to type and page design breaking with traditional layout systems. David Carson has designed various layouts, he became well known for his experimental, deconstructive typographic designs and art direction for Ray Gun magazine.
STYLISTIC FEAYURES
1- Bold “Saturated” colour – Very intense to suit the sun drenched atmosphere of the subject matter and relate to trendy “pop” culture of the audience. Eye catching exaggerated colour makes life seem more intense and exciting.
2- Deconstructed Text - overlapping, cut off by the edge of the page, different sizes, fonts, and orientations (horizontal, vertical) = difficult to read. The viewer has to stop and “work out” what is being said so they spend more time looking at and absorbing the design.
3- Illegible Text - Sometimes the text is just there to “look cool” serving a decorative rather than functional purpose. Becomes an interesting pattern in itself with only fragments being readable. The younger audience often doesn’t need or want to read lengthy passages and is happy to get the message as “fragments” of meaning. Style more important than meaning.
4- Freehand drawing and decorative patterns randomly distributed around the design to contrast with the very mechanical and formal letter forms. These give an anti-establishment effect of being free from the rules of established society.
