David Carson and "grunge typography"

Over at The Awl, Sharan Shetty posted a great essay about the "Rise and Fall of Grunge Typography." Shetty chose to start her story with pioneering designer David Carson, infamous in the early 1990s for making the text in Ray Gun magazine completely unreadable. For example, Carson once converted an entire article on Bryan Ferry into Zapf Dingbats (above). If you need more eyeball spanking from Carson, his seminal monograph "The End of Print" has just been republished in a lovely hardcover. From The Awl:

The aesthetic was fueled by raw emotion, but Carson’s tactics were made imitable by technology. The rise of grunge typography coincided with the burgeoning popularity of the Macintosh, which, introduced in 1984, permanently altered the landscape of graphic design and typography. The art of designing by hand—a painful craft of precision and consistency—was no longer the only option. Designers were liberated; the screen and their imagination were the only constraints. In many ways, the modifier "grunge" denotes for typography what it does for music: unfettered, unrestrained, a cry against convention. The experimental typographer is almost always the young typographer, and young typographers in the 90s, armed with new software and ideas, rejected the rule-based fonts of their forebears.

"The Rise And Fall Of Grunge Typography" (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

"The End of Print: The Grafik Design of David Carson" (Amazon)

• [Peter Shultz]

  Two words “Ed Fella”

  David Carson is mostly an art director. Most of his designers were trained by Ed. Ed was making grunge type for 30 years before David Carson.

• [Col McGillveray]

  Interesting

• [dolo54]

  I remember picking up a copy of Ray Gun and thinking ‘this graphic designer needs to never design again.’ I pitied the poor writers who worked for the magazine, all that work done knowing no one will ever be able to read it. Might as well have copy pasted lorem ipsum blocks and turned that in.

  • [Boundegar]

    How do you know they didn’t?

    I remember when there was a “grunge sound.”  But after Cobain died, people just called it rock.

    • [dolo54]

      I remember being particularly irritated trying to read an article I really wanted to read. I actually gave up on it when the type turned semi-transparent over a photograph.

• [Deirdre Spencer]

  If memory serves, the (legible) text of the infamous Bryan Ferry article was found in the back of the magazine, where stories are usually continued. 

  Usually I’d agree about legibility being important in design, but I loved Raygun for making its look echo the beauty and messiness and chaos of attending a show. It was thrilling to see a team of designers pushing the boundaries like that each month. For a music magazine’s design to feel more inspired by album cover design than by, say, Time Magazine’s layout made perfect sense to me at the time. 

  The written content was great, too. 

  • [Roger Krueger]

    The Dingbats decision was specifically an expression of frustration at how worthless the interview was. Or at least that was his story at the time.

• [Maneki Nico]

  “In 1989 When I first did Beach Culture, people said, ‘Oh, he’s just a flash in the pan.’ Well, if that’s the case, I’m happy to have at least been in the pan.”
  —David Carson, February 1996

  I’m not one for idols, but I do have a copy of HOW Magazine with a cover story on Carson I had him autograph. Perhaps not surprisingly, his signature is kinda illegible.

• [Sujit Patwardhan]

  I’m surprised by the negative comments about Grunge Types and David Carson. Carson along with others like Ed Fella, Emigre etc forced graphic design to change… to travel along a different path, enriching the vocabulary of design in much the  same way as John Coltrane  did to Jazz. Even the Swiss School of Design wasn’t immune to the revolutionary changes taking place in the world (and these were reflected in design and typography) – just see the work of April Greiman and Wolfgang Weingart. I love the minimalist typography of Emile Ruder, Joseph Mueller-Brockmann and Armin Hofmann but I also love David Carson.

• [judf]

  we were doing this with letraset in the 70′s….