David Carson, born on September 8th, 1995, is an American graphic designer and often attributed as one of, if not the, creator of the ‘grunge’ style.

Another key influence Carson had on graphic design and type was in how surf and skateboarding culture bled into the mainstream through his work. Carson was a professional surfer before his graphic design career, and worked at Transworld Skateboarding as an art director as one of his early jobs; his ties and experiences in these underground “street-cultures” no doubt influenced his work throughout his life, especially the angst and counter-culture in his early work. He set the mood for what underground culture should look like in the 90s: raw, dirty, emotional, new; a new focus on questioning why things were the way they did, better yet, a rejection of tradition and norms in their entirety.

In typography, Carson’s influence can be found in his rejection of the grid, often setting type by hand based on the layout, rather than following rigid column and row guides; this technique would be imitated frequently for the next decade, but was often hit or miss, often relying on taste and vision of the designer.

Carson felt that the shape of type, where it was on a page, the style of it, and its abstract relationship to other elements in a composition were where the true information of type came from; in a way, he felt the message wasn’t just in the words, but in the way you read them, the raw emotions you feel from it. By questioning the fundamental purpose of type, Carson was able to approach it from a fresh, new perspective. While his work was often critiqued for being difficult to read, often due to its abandonment of any and all typical conventions related to legibility, this difficulty was, in fact, the point.

A clear example of this influence can be found in the work of Chris Ashworth: an art director of Ray Gun magazine after Carson left, Ashworth uses similar media and technique as Carson in his work, capturing the dirty, street-borne feeling. Ashworth even referred to his style as “swiss-grit”, referencing the way he repurposed ‘bland’ swiss fonts such as Helvetica for dark and grimy compositions (though notably Carson refused to use Helvetica in his own work).

The sarcastic and counter-culture tones of the 80s and 90s, of which Carson’s work pushed to its limits, can also be seen in other artists of the time, such as the British studio, The Designer’s Republic, who were infamous for their cynical attitude. Though they had different aesthetics, especially in their choice of typefaces, the treatment of type and the emotion and character it holds as an equal to the literal meaning of the text is a shared theme between them.

It isn’t well known whether Carson has designed a typeface himself, though there are many misattributed to him. Instead, Carson was better known for creating new type styles from the manipulation of existing typefaces. Aside are a few samples of this from his work on rebranding Western union. Carson uses a few different techniques to obscure the legibility of the type: he overlays serif and sans serif, substitutes an ‘e’ for the letter ‘m’ in the sans serif type, changes the orientation of the letters, and uses print effects and overlays to add noise and distortion within the type. The effect of this on the observer is that it prevents it from being as readable on first glance, forcing them to search the noise for hints as to what the message might be. The reason these examples work so well is that they obscure everything but the key identifiers of the letter forms. Even where the letters cover each other, their counters are quite clear, especially in the ‘s’ and ‘e’ letter forms. The ‘m’, turned into an ‘E’ in the way it's rotated, appeals to the observer’s recognition of three horizontal lines as an uppercase ‘E’ symbol.