David Carson – RayGun

Ray Gun was an alternative rock magazine founded in 1992 by art director David Carson alongside editors Randy Bookasta and Neil Feineman. The publication ran for seven years.

Carson’s signiature style is seen throughout the magazine’s typography, layout and choice of imagary. This consits of a rejection of the conventional grid format and typographic rules. Often lines of text would be spread over two pages, or simply cut off on the edge of the page. Type was blown up to different sizes that did not indicate any conventional sense of hierarchy. Type overlapped in places. At time parts of the magazine were barely legible. This did not bother Carson as he was more concerned about conveying expression. Carson allowed the feeling of each article to dictate the way it looked. He would respond to the music being spoken about or the tone of the article and try to replicate that feeling visually.

Carson speaks about this approach in an interview for designboom where he talks about the cover of their biggest selling issue. The issue’s cover features no cover lines, instead it simply features a photograph of Keith Richards. Carson justifies this in the interview as “the editor had given me a few cover lines including one about keith richards coming clean about sex, drugs, rock and roll etc. I looked at this portrait and realized you really didn’t need to say anything else, the landscape of his face said it all.”