Ray Gun was an American alternative rock-and-roll magazine, first published in 1992 in Santa Monica, California. Led by founding art director David Carson, Ray Gun explored experimental magazine typographic design. The result was a chaotic, abstract style, not always readable, but distinctive in appearance. That tradition for compelling visuals continued even after Carson abruptly left the magazine after barely three years; he was followed by a series of art directors, including Robert Hales, Chris Ashworth, Scott Denton-Cardew, and Jerome Curchod.
In terms of content, Ray Gun was also notable for its choices of subject matter. The cutting-edge musical artists and pop culture icons spotlighted were typically ahead of the curve, putting such artists as Radiohead, Bjork, Beck, Flaming Lips, PJ Harvey and Eminem on its cover long before its better-known competitors.
David Carson set words in oddly mixed capitals and lowercase letters, some blurred, others overlaid, still others stuffed into small, inclined boxes. As one observer noted, Carson shattered "the Modernist grid [that] subverts the personality of the designer to the primacy of the corporate." That meant eliminating the nice, the clean, and the readable in favor of scattered headlines and illegible text across overlapping photos. Carson explains: "Overall people are reading less. I'm just trying to visually entice them to read." Hence he designed this.
Book by Carson:
More about David Carson:
The Other End of Print: David Carson, Graphic Design, and the Aesthetics of Media by
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, click here.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, click here.
Hope you'll get inspired.
A.
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