David Carson’s “Design, discovery and humor” talk at TED

Great design is a never-ending journey of discovery — for which it helps to pack a healthy sense of humor. Sociologist and surfer-turned-designer David Carson walks through a gorgeous (and often quite funny) slide deck of his work and found images.

David Carson’s boundary-breaking typography in the 1990s, in Ray Gun magazine and other pop-cult books, ushered in a new vision of type and page design — quite simply, breaking the traditional mold of type on a page and demanding fresh eyes from the reader. Squishing, smashing, slanting and enchanting the words on a layout, Carson made the point, over and over, that letters on a page are art. You can see the repercussions of his work to this day, on a million Flash intro pages (and probably just as many skateboards and T-shirts). His first book, with Lewis Blackwell and a foreword by David Byrne, is The End of Print: Graphic Design of David Carson, and he’s written or collaborated on several others, including the magisterial The Book of Probes, an exploration of the thinking of Marshall McLuhan. His latest book is Trek: David Carson, Recent Werk, a collection of his recent work.