Design Like David
"After copying and pasting literally every individual name from the list of typographers into a search engine, there was only one that stood out to me; David Carson. His collage pieces caught my attention first before I continued to research the rest of his work. I personally enjoy working with collages and Carson was really the only designer that was pleasing to my eye. In my opinion, Carson is extremely experimental with his typography and tweaks his type to have more of a “sketched out” feel. I turned more towards his experimental type because it would be more of a challenge to work with. But instead of completely shutting down a collage look, I decided to include some overlapping effects throughout my design. Looking into the control letters the class was assigned, I noticed the shape of his counters were never a perfect shape. Carson used very uneven counters in his typography and used a variety of different sizes for it. Because Carson’s work is so experimental, I would consider his type of face to be leaning more in the direction of slab serif due to the angled ends of each letter. Carson’s ascenders and descenders are both very dramatic and obviously shown. Along the lines of dramatic, I decided to go with a double tail on the ‘Q’ because David Carson is not one to follow the rules. He also plays around with high x-heights, making his typeface stronger. Although David Carson’s typography was challenging to take on, I now better understand a more experimental typeface."
An article I wrote about an inspiration of mine. Someone I have looked up to since the beginning of my design career. And an artist that is always on my mind when I sit down to create. David Carson changed the typography standards without any hesitation of people potentially not accepting it. That's why I chose to study him, because I wanted to learn how to be bolder in design, in myself. If there's one thing I learned from this project, it's confidence. Sure, I learned the anatomy of typography and different types of serifs, but if I can take one thing away from this, challenge the norms and don't play it safe. So thank you David Carson. For teaching me that my imagination and creation is not limited to anyone else's standards, except my own. Think freely.