How to be an iconoclast

Ok today's primary assignment is a poster for #yeghelp in the style of David Carson. In case you don't know who that is, David Carson is a typographic designer of rather large repute. Some call him the father of grunge. Most everyone would call him an iconoclast. He basically walked into the neat and tidy world of typography as a rank and unschooled amateur and ripped it apart. Then he smooshed and squished all the ripped up bits together. His designs look kinda like layers of posters weathered by rain and glue.

Arguably Carson's best known quote, and one which very much sums up his approach to typographic design is, "Don't mistake legibility for communication.".




When I first went to art school, (before David Carson climbed off the surf board and started rocking the typographic world) legibility was pretty much king of the hill. There were some notable exceptions -- groovy pyschedelic posters from the 60s, the odd spot where decoration wasn't an embarrassment, things intended for very specific audiences making wider accessibility less of an issue. But basically if we hadn't tightly held to the guiding principle of legibility first and foremost, our teachers came down on us hard. They used scalpels and glue sticks to mend our errant ways. It was for our own good, they said. Legibilty was important they thundered, nagged and whined, because communication was what typography was all about. If people couldn't read the words, you had failed in your mission to communicate.

But see, this is what makes David Carson a genius. Carson knows that communication is what typography is all about. He just thinks that simple legibility leaves out much of what communication is all about. Without anyone ever telling him otherwise, he figured out that visual communication happens prior to reading. Visual communication is there in shape and colors and textual feel, and we receive that message before we start reading. So he roasted the sacred cow of legibility. My favorite Carson moment, and a truly heroic act, is him deciding to set what he took to be a "poorly written and insipid" article on Bryan Ferry all in dingbats. It's too perfect. It's a stroke of genius.

Now the notion of emulating an iconoclast is a strange one. In this case plan B might be to veer sharply back and strive for perfect legibility using clean black and white Helvetica with mathematically perfect leading and optimal kerning. But the iconoclast thang happens to be only my spin on the situation -- really the assignment is to emulate Carson. As difficult to execute as plan B is, plan A of sticking to the assignment might actually be harder. Trying to paint like Jackson Pollack looks like it's gonna be easy until you actually try it. So I better shut up and get started.

At any rate, #yeghelp and Carson are a good thematic match. Twitter is kind of a chaos of layered and jumbled words, big on communication, but not necessarily so big on content. So I think I'll stick to plan A as assigned and settle for sending my tweets in dingbats as my own little plan B.