David Carson, Ray Gun

"David Carson is the "grunge typographer" whose magazine Ray Gun helped explode the
possibilities of text on a page."

David Carson is a famous initiative and a very creative graphic designer. He has won over 170 awards for his graphic design, some being "best overall design" and "cover of the year". He was employed in 1992 by Martin Scott (the publisher) to start his inventive work on Ray Gun.

Carson is now well known for his role of art director in the alternative, rock magazine, Ray Gun. This is a magazine that experimented with the 'laws' of magazine design. Carson essentially took the norm and completely changed it. Usually the 'popular' magazines like 'top of the pops' stuck to the identical master heads and continuous layout of the magazine for each issue.  But the abstract and unusual design of Ray Gun made it stand out and manifest in this unique style, no - one had yet accomplished his kind of vision before.

One famous front cover he designed was where he had used a font that only included symbols for words (and even Carson commented that he classed that as boring in an interview). He had made his own front cover unreadable, yet it had just seemed acceptable to do this in a music magazine, as it almost goes well with the music genre, being alternative and indie. 

David Carson left the magazine in 1995 and moved on to do work in New York in his own studio. Ray Gun had its last issue in January 2000 with issue no. 74, with Nine Inch Nails on the front cover.