review


from the revised edition of the end of print

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archive: review-from the revised edition of the end of print: from the revised edition of the end of print. (now the largest selling graphic design book ever)
 
by Bill Gubbins
 
I love R. Meltzer! So, this little piece, this etude really, is dedicated to him! And to his work! And to his life!
 
And to the technique he pioneered, c.1973, in his still-unpublished autobiography, excerpted in an issue of Fusion magazine back t-t-t-then, that featured an exclamation point at the end of every sentence! Yes, every sentence!
 
I still remember! It was a big deal to me! I kept laughing so hard, I couldn’t stop! But he was serious about doing this exclamation point thing! And I didn’t know if it was okay that I found it so wonderfully funny! And so wonderfully great! And it was an epiphany that something so simple could cause such a powerful effect! He just let it go: and put an exclamation point, at the end of, every sentence!
 
And I went: How simple! How brilliant! And then: I could have thought of that! I should have thought of that! But I didn’t! And now, he had! And forever I be there, but worthless besides him!
 
Now, of course, it was hilarious (and hea-vy, too) that he left in that exclamation point! (At the end of every sentence!) But his words were good, too! And I paid damn close attention to that, because I did not-I repeat did NOT-want to feel that I got carried away by some goddamn gimmick! By some trick! By some ROCK CRITIC trick! And I was worried that somehow I would be deceived-no, better yet, see-duced-into thinking that what I was reading was great writing when, in point of fact, it was mediocre writing in the service of a little known (and-ah-ha!-I later found out: Celine inspired!) literary gimmick that was pulled out faster than you’d need Alka-Seltzer on The Good Ship Lollipop!
 
So, man, oh man, I went back and pored over that damn story of his, over and over again, and over and over again, to try to figure out how to separate the specialness of this device from the actual words it went with and to try to establish, clearly establish, you know, lawyer-style, that I hadn’t been goddamn had! By R. ding-dang Meltzer of all people!
 
Now my conclusion-then, as now-was that no, he had really meant it, that he wasn’t just trying to be s-s-s-silly, and that it was ALL RIGHT for me to just lean back and enjoy it, to. . . let it be!
 
And I knew, just knew, knew, knew it; that this technique, this exclamation point thing (at the end of every sentence!) was soo good, sooo smooth, as it sent chills right down my b-b-b-backbone, that it would be picked up by every damn writer everywhere and that this exclamation thing (!) was going to be everywhere, all at once, at the very same time, ubiquitous!
 
But I can’t get away from how impressionable I was and what it meant to me and how refreshing I found (that’s the best word-refreshing), I found it that he used an exclama-tion point at the end of every single godforsaken sentence-every single sentence!-in that piece and I read it so carefully, time and again, over and over and over (again!) to see if I could find the one (one!) sentence that he’d buried that didn’t have an exclamation point at the end of it!
 
And, no, I never found it, cause: every single sentence in this piece had an exclamation point! At the end!
 
And, yes, finally, after countless rereadings, and ponderations, of 1973 proportions, I concluded that: he meant it! Meant for every single sentence to have an exclamation point at the end of it! And that no, gimmick couldn’t be separated from the words, nor the words from the gimmick, and it was okay that it was that way and I shouldn’t worry anymore about it! Ever, ever, ever again!
 
I should just accept: R. Meltzer’s a great writer and, gimmick or no, it worked! It just worked! Of course-ah-HA! ALL you epiphany hounds, here it comes: think how awful this gimmick would be in the hands of some writer-some hack!-so much less skilled than R. himself! Of course you do! . . .
 
Radical gear shift ahead! Grrrrrrind me a pound! Ungrrrrrungh!
 
The End of Print was an awful title for a book and I felt so at the time and I still feel so today! More presumptuous than all get out! And it bothered me so damn much that I had to sort of figure it out! In fact, the title had the same effect-but in reverse qualitative stool-than the exclamation point!
 
Man, that title made me mad! Who in the f’ do Dave and Lewie think they are, soundin’ this pretentious death knell for all this print stuff?!
 
You know, bad, bad, bad title, conveying a bad, bad, BAD thought! You know: oooohhhh, oooohhhh, the boogie men have come! Oooohhhh, oooohhhh, Dave and Lewie am gonna blow the whole house down! They think print is gonna catch fire and die! All our hard word, our loyalty, our love of the printed word, or precious words, KILLED by a book (a folkin’ BOOK!) that says: That’s it! Adult swim! Everybody out of the pool! Party’s over! Put on your clothes, boys, I’m taking you home! And, no more paper now, baby. . .blue!
 
But then I woke up! And I realized the title was just a marketing gimmick! A way of socking it to the reader! (Oh, you helpless reader, you, standing amidst the dusty airwaves of The Strand!) And, in the same way I reconciled myself to accepting my love of R.’s exclamatory technique, so I came to accept my hate of the title of The End of Print (think of it like an old-fashioned radio echo on WLS-the voice of labor!-in Chicago before rollin’ “Woolly Bully”: The End of Print-Print-Print-rint-rint-rint-int-int-int-nt-nt-nt-t-t-t-t) cause it was just, it was just: TOO MUCH!
 
But just think about how David’s technique has fared in the hands of those lesser talents than himself!
 
Of course you do.

A Hero of Deconstruction

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archive: review-A Hero of Deconstruction: A Hero of Deconstruction
 
from The London Times Sunday magazine
 
“David Carson printed a dull article as unfathomable symbols. Readers loved it, Lewis Blackwell explores the work of graphic design genius”
 
As you read this, David Carson is probably in a hotel room in a strange city somewhere preparing for yet another show. From New York to London, Brussels to New Orleans, the tour goes on. His lifestyle echoes that of a rock star, or religious cult leader. But he is something more seminal to this media-saturated age of ours. Carson is a graphic designer.
 
Once this job description had all the glamour of the technician that it largely described-someone who helped things appear on the right bit of paper. But graphics has changed. In the Eighties, the designer rose to prominence, a figure invested with the authority to remake the modern world.
 
In their work designers celebrated the Self, trumpeted individualism and led the obsession for consumerables whose value was multiplied through a label. Designer jeans, designer perfume, designer restaurants-the hand or signature of the designer-creator came to be an important (if often spurious) mark of quality. In the past few years, we may have dismissed Eighties style, but there seems little lessening of the desire for creative heroes. In an age when values are at best questioned, at worst entirely shot away, those who can make up their own rules and pitch them out there have the firm basis of a career. Appearance is everything. Until you buy a new one.
 
Graphic design, which didn’t quite peak in the Eighties, has arrived. Now that everybody has an ironic post-modernist take on their information sources, the graphic designer is pitched as high priest at the altar of mass-communication. Press conferences are held to launch minor tweakings of corporate logos, while lavish awards cram the calendar, showering honour on the makers of the media.
 
But fewcan hope to catch the wave as David Carson has done. Perhaps it is because he is a one-time professional surfer-reputedly reaching a peak of number eight in the world-that he seems to have an instinctive grasp of the forces behind the times. Perhaps it is also that he is almost entirely self-taught, and thus escaped having dinned into him the “right way of doing things” which inevitably congeals into dogma, the destiny of which is to be torn apart.
 
Carson has shown excellent timing and an ability to stay at the adge: from the early Eighties when he learnt how to design a magazine as he went along, knocking out a 200-page skateboarding magazine in the evenings after teaching at high school near San Diego, through the years of catching attention with offbeat publishing, to the recent years of stardom and a queue of clients across print, advertising, television and film.
 
While rivals might question his success, and often speak cynically of Carson’s ability to get talked about, they have to admit he does have something-the indefinable eye. Even his enemies admit the man has talent. The distinct difference of Carson’s work, and its wildfire effect on the imagination of young designers, has ensured that he is applauded or attacked as the art director/designer of this era.
 
In the radical vision of Carson’s graphics, a generation of designers has a new creed to follow. This involves, to describe the work crudely, free-form pages and films, beautifully difficult-to-read typography, distressed images and eclectic multi-cultural sources of material, all working to spin a richly seductive form for his client’s communications-messages which range from the latest Microsoft poster campaign to the Giorgio Armani magazine, anti-smoking ads, short films , books and commercials.
 
Carson’s sold-out speaking tour coincides with the launch of Second Sight: grafik design after the end of print (Laurence King, f35 /f25), which attempts to reveal the theory behind the seemingly unruly nature of all this output. The first book on his work, The End Of Print , sold 120,000 copies worldwide-not enough to begin paying out the advance of a John Grisham novel, but unprecedented for a graphic design book.
 
As the author, or collaborator, on both books, I am scarcely the best person to assess their merit-but can at least claim an inside knowledge of their making and the motives of the man behind the work. With the first book, we unintentionally caught the vogue for “end-ism” (we were at the beginning of the rash of books titled “The End Of…”) , noting how the growth of media was changing print and how it was stimulating radical questions about what we read and how we want to see it. With the latest book we looked for the forces behind this design that runs so counter to the reasoning of traditional practice.
 
Carson is an intriguing mix of innocence and experience. He has a sociology degree and has worked in design for a decade. Yet he still displays remarkable gaps in his knowledge of design history, or indeed of some basic craft practices. Younger designers often assume he is a child of the digital era, where the technology invites play with type and images, but in fact his approach was forged before moving on to the computer. He spends time finding and saving junked materials, taking photographs, and playing with surfaces outside of the computer environment. His work has more in common with fine artists-notably Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Rothko-than it has with other designers. He only really uses one software program, whereas the typical young graphic designer tends to dip in and out of a handful.
 
Instead of having all the answers, Carson’s work is driven by asking questions. In an often highly self-conscious manner, his layouts and films are full of details that make you aware of the surface of the page or screen, make you aware of the medium and of its rules-rules which Carson takes as things to be twisted in his intuitive search for new ways of doing things.
 
This idea of intuition is at the core of the work. In a rejection of the rationalism behind Modernist design, he has embraced intuition as being a long-underrated virtue of creative work. In this he is tapping into a deeply unfashionable area of philosophy, one which connects with the quasi-spiritual approach of Henri Bergson at the turn of the century, and also links with the current vogue for Outsider Art, or Art Brut.
 
Carson is not expecting a warm reception from the “design industry” for such an attitude. With graphic designers often desperate to suggest to likely clients that their work is some kind of soft science, almost guaranteed to deliver measurable improvement in a company’s performance, the last thing they need is a contemporary design guru saying good design is at its best as a personal, gut-feeling, a mixing of self-expression into public messages.
 
But such words strike a deeply resonant chord with designers as yet free of corporate pressures. They can sense that Carson’s approach touches the very reason why they do the job in the first place: to try and shape the world in some way, so that it enriches life in a broader sense than just delivering results on a company’s bottom line.
 
For the general viewer-or perhaps you and I-the appeal of the work is, at first sight, simply that it is refreshingly different. He challenged conventions about readability and about page structure, even magazine structure. This leads to the removal of page numbering, the subversion of descriptive contents pages, even the abandonment of beginning at the beginning (one magazine started in the middle and worked out in both directions, with some articles ending on an associated internet site).
 
These were pyrotechnics of from, rarely supported by the content of what were otherwise fairly tame editorial products. In his frustration with yet another dull article in the magazine Ray Gun he went so far as to produce it in an entirely unreadable typeface of symbols. Interestingly, this caused no apparent backlash from readers, but only won more admiration.
 
In moving away from niche magazines and into the world of international advertising, and more heavyweight work, Carson is running the risk of losing control. His most influential magazine work came out of a process that saw him send the magazine to the printer without recourse to the editor or publisher. But such freedom is not possible when you are helping present a global brand to its marketplace in a dozen different languages, with a dozen different corporate divisions all bidding to make their mark.
 
Only in creating his own book, or in some of his smaller one-off jobs and teaching roles, dose Carson now get the kind of freedom that has turned on a generation of graphic designers. Whatever his next move, though, one thing is sure that he has been a major influence in creating a tidal force of change in the look and logic of contemporary graphics. Next time you like the look of something but can’t at first quite work out what it is saying, thank David Carson. Or not.
 
Lewis Blackwell is head of Getty Images.