David Carson

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Just because something's legible doesn't means it communicates. More importantly, it doesn't mean it communicates the right thing. So, what is the message sent before somebody actually gets into the material? And I think that's sometimes an overlooked area.”

“Overall, people are reading less.”

“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.”

“Having done a lot of magazines, I'm very curious how big magazines handle big stories, and I was very curious to see how 'Time' and 'Newsweek' would handle 9/11. And I was basically pretty disappointed to see that they had chosen to show the photo we'd already seen a million times, which was basically the moment of impact.”

“Never mistake legibility for communication.”

“I think we've seen a lot of examples of giving a name its own definition in the dot-com world. Amazon, Google, Yahoo - these are names we never would have dreamed major corporations would choose.”

“I did an early version of my site where it was virtually impossible to get through it, just as a statement about the web. But after a few laughs and some angry e-mails, I realized it wasn't doing me much good. I think the web has become more about the final product, not what it takes to get to it.”

“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.”

“When I work as an art director, I don't ask to see sketches from illustrators or photographers. I give them a basic idea, and then I say, 'Send it to me, it'll be fine' - I get out of the way.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I literally cannot work without music.”

“I was teaching, which I didn't love or hate; it was just OK. I was OK with it, and the hours were good for surfing or whatever. All not good reasons to go into teaching.”

“The dreaded phrase in design circles is 'show and tell.'”

“Some people hate lime-green; red has all this emotional baggage. Blue seems to be overall one of the more positive colors, and a little more serious than yellow.”

“There's many ways you communicate. With colour, texture, sound... Even words can communicate.”