David Carson

These are the duo that really like... made the early transworld snowboarding scene happen.

The art direction was via now-design superstar David Carson, who was also laying out the skate mags.

So Guy Motil and Kevin Kinnear, they'd worked together on surf magazines.

They were, you know, the story goes that they were ready to do something different.

So they, you know, they finally saw they needed snowboarders probably.

Anyway, even the design of the magazine at the first was to support like what you're talking about, that goal of professionalism and helping snowboarding get to be accepted and versus being counterculture accepted.

David Carson is a magazine art director.

He's known a lot for that avant-garde design, kind of like throwing the design rulebook out the window and doing crazy deconstructed collage-style work and using typography in ways that no one had ever seen used before.

Okay, I love it.

Since you were mentioning like the 90s in that moment, and that was kind of my formative, like I was a teenager in the 90s, right? And like the Ray Gunn magazine and all of that, you know, David Carson era of like, you know, playing with legibility and like, you know, and it seems like very much like the the full pendulum swing away from that like post-war Swiss, you know, strict grid thing.

And now we have this like cultural homogeneity, homogeneity of like the AI aesthetic, right? Where everything's looking the same.

And so it's like, maybe there's like a similar pendulum swing away from that now.

I mean, in retrospect, it almost feels like a peak 90s moment, but at the time it wouldn't have played like that, right? I still think we hadn't had Trent Reznor and later, you know, obviously Atticus Ross collaborating so much with Fincher, you know, as his soundtrack people.

um and uh yeah it was like just it was just disturbing imagery it was the mind of the killer it was fantastic short-handing but you know i don't think anybody was prepared for something like that um and very much also i guess that sort of design aesthetic too was was again i mean i think it was maybe slightly ahead of its time i'm trying to think of when ray i don't think ray gun magazine and all that david carson was pushing out Yeah, Rogan

was late 90s, yeah.

Yeah, right.

It had an effect on you, didn't it, Garth?

Yeah, I mean, that was sort of, I was about to start studying design in Sydney a couple of years later.

And I think that aesthetic, I could just say Alex definitely sort of fed Ray Gunn, David Carson was around already, the famed typographer from the 90s who sort of, blew up everyone's ideas around how type works on the page and this is sort of a reimagining for cinema and you know every title sequence you saw after this you know you were flying through debris you you know they were they were playing with typography they were playing with the way that music interacted with the typography I mean, you know, David Fincher went on to do the Fight Club title sequence with a similar sort of, you know, avant-garde approach to that sort of stuff.

But, you know, even stuff like Lost in Space, I remember in 97, sort of cribbed from this as well.

And we started drawing farts on the course, like...

Not very good, but it's a funny story because at the time there was a guy called David Carson.

He was traveling the world doing workshops.

So the school I got into eventually changed his name to Denmark's Design School.

Was that for a year or so?

Yeah, that was a year.

And then during that time, David Carson came to the school and he did this workshop.

I happened to come in and everyone was giving him their typefaces on floppy disks.

He said, uh, "Let's get the best of the best." And so these are all people that we, um, have coming up on the show, uh, through the end of this year.

So Studio Dunbar, Porter Rocha, shout-out to Alex from Mouthwash, and even David Carson's gonna come and bring some chaos.

He's gotta respond to the email, though.

Yeah, he's hard to book.

He's hard to track down

... [laughs] some of these are recorded, some of them are not.

David Carson, again, hard to schedule.

But none of these shows are as important as tonight's show, because these shows were recorded in front of an audience of six people in our studio, and they didn't really wanna listen.

And our show art was designed by Shawn Carney.

This episode featured interviews with Ursula Mathers-Nairt, Myra McNulty, and Leanne and Garrow Gerwig, with voiceover by Margot Avery and David Carson.

Special thanks to Caitlin Rege, Felix Poon, Bill Wilson, and Sam Gurwitz.

Death of an Artist is a production of Pushkin Industries.