Skip to main contentLike a couple hundred other aspiring civilian designers, I paid my 10 bucks to attend a (local art mag-sponsored, local art college-hosted) mid-May lecture by graphics guru David Carson. You know Carson. He's the legendary guy who broke the grid. The guy who ran type into the gutter. The guy who showed...only half the logo.
A pro-surfer-turned-art-director of music-minded Raygun magazine, ad man for edgy apparel brands from Nike to Armani to Quiksilver, and image maker for Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails, 46-year-old Carson became the graphic design world's enfant terrible of the 1990s. His instantly recognizable method of bullying text, abrading the page surface, and generally f-ing up conventional design harmonies still reverberates through the work of his
imitators. His imitators are legion. Many of them live and work here (just look at the busiest cubicle in your pod).
And when I say imitators, I don't just mean mouse jockeys. Carson's influence encouraged a coterie of crossover kids. Ours is a town where you can't throw a Diesel sneaker without hitting a corporate-design-serf-turned-fashion-dabbler (Nike Design group, you know who you are), many of whom borrow from Carson's bag of tricks. This very column has covered scads of street-wear silk-screeners (Erik Railton, Dan Garland, Scot Hampton's Fizzknuckle) trying to change the culture with a T-shirt and a titanium laptop. There are way too many to mention here.
But as I looked around at Carson's audience, a collective of cool black-spectacled spectators inside the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and listened to Carson himself mutter in a somewhat addled, bong-trodden way about his career's rebellious highlights, well, I got a little pissed.
And here's why: Drop the hero worship already.
What emerges from Carson's actual work is not the "brave" way he shoves type around, but his hot-dog experimentation with a bigger idea: using design to question visual convention. Rather than work left to more mainstream, why not layer and squeeze words, expose registration and crop marks, mix fonts, clip, shred and crop images to the point of near obliteration?
With his surfer's shrug, Carson said: "Never mistake legibility for communication."
Or, in other words, why not challenge people's expectations of "good" communication design? He made his observation clear when he said that most producers of commercial culture radically underestimate their audience. People will strain to accept and understand something if it shocks a cultural nerve--whether it's a crabbed line of text or Thom Yorke's Radiohead-ed rumblings or a smear of visual static down the sleeve of a jacket.
Fast forward to fashion with me then, why don't you?
Why not challenge people's notions of wearability, all you little seamsters and silk-screeners? Hot nelly, we have talent here. And if there's a design-based business that needs a backhoe driven through it, it's fashion. I'm not talking a George-Bailey-lassos-Louis-Vuitton scenario--unlike in graphic design, there's no Adobe Sewingshop that will universally empower the upstart clothing designer to rocket to the level of big manufacturers. Still, for the love of Microsoft, it does get better than a silk-screened T-shirt. Carson's magic message was that a designer's personal mojo and spark--his or her willingness to challenge basic assumptions about materials and mass appeal--can be powerful, mountain-moving commodities. How could an upstart tape-and-staples shop like the copycatish Imitation of Christ hold the style world hostage if this notion weren't equally true of fashion?
The designers on the extreme margin, the ones really rocking the way we think about clothes, are breaking fashion down to its substantive components and envisioning them as raw, flexible basics with which to execute ideas that are more back-of-an-envelope than back-of-a-boardroom. From Final Home's clothing made using industrial fabrics and methods (Japan) to Freitag's recycled-truck-tarp messenger bags (Switzerland), good style is coming from fruitful collaborations between fashion and graphic designers.
Now maybe it should come from somewhere around
here.
Final Home available at Poker Face, 128 SW 3rd Ave., 294-0445, or at www.finalhome.com .
Freitag truck tarp bags available at www.freitag.ch .
, by David Carson. $39.95 at Powell's Books, 1005 W. Burnside St., 228-4651.
WWeek 2015