Top 15 David Carson Quotes

When I first started my graphic design career, and ‘Beach Culture‘ magazine, I pretty much ran from the surfer label. It was hard to get people to take you seriously.

My site is a little unorthodox without being totally inaccessible.

I tend not to have a ton of clients at any one time, but some pretty interesting ones.

I literally cannot work without music.

I never learned all the things you’re not supposed to do; I just do what makes the most sense.

I’m experimenting in public. At the design grad schools, these are people sitting around in groups, putting their work on a wall, analyzing it and putting it back in a drawer. I think there’s little risk in that.

Good things are associated with blue, like clear days, more than singing the blues. Just the word ‘blue’ in the singular is full of optimism and positive connotation to most people.

For some reason I have a visual intuition that allows me to design things in an interesting way, and I don’t know where that came from. Because I don’t have this formal training, I seem to drift in a different direction.

Maybe at some subconscious level, things are done to upset somebody – part of me continues to see no valid reason for many of the accepted rules of design.

When I first redesigned the ‘Surfer’ magazine, a magazine about magazines took a copy to the famous American designer Milton Glaser, and – surprise surprise – he hated it.

Overall, people are reading less.

I’m a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that’s sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting – whatever it is.

I think I work much the same way I always have. I’m trying to interpret something emotionally visually. I’m reading the brief or article, or listening to the music, and deciding where that sends me, and what would it look like.

If I’m doing a logo, I’ll do it in black and white. Once the form is feeling right, only then do I start exploring the color palettes. A good example was the process of rebranding the Salvador Dali Museum. I did at least 100 versions in black and white.

There’s many ways you communicate. With colour, texture, sound… Even words can communicate.