David Carson Quotes

I don't start with a design objective, I start with a communication objective. I feel my project is successful if it communicates what it is supposed to communicate.

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.

People do not read first. First and foremost, they see color. Then they see numbers, then shape, and then, if you still have their attention and they understand what you put in front of them, then they will read.

Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to. But this is not to say that because we have got used to something demonstrably less legible than something else would be if we could get used to it, we should make no effort to scrap the existing thing. This was done by the Florentines and Romans of the fifteenth century; it requires simply good sense in the originators & good will in the rest of us.

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.

If I was influenced by anything, it was architecture: structure having to do with logic. If you don't do it right, the whole thing is going to cave in. In a certain sense, you can carry that to graphic design. Fortunately, however, nobody is going to die if you do it wrong.

For me, until I know that the audience really gets what I'm trying to communicate I'm not done.

Anyone with a computer and a design program can create a page layout. But unless you're trained in design, it won't look very good and it won't communicate very well.

Words and pictures can work together to communicate more powerfully than either alone.

Never mistake legibility for communication.

Problems with visual design can turn users off so quickly that they never discover all the smart choices you made with navigation or interaction design.

Just because something is legible doesn't mean it communicates...

Lettering should be invisible. You shouldn't notice it, unless it is a determined piece of storytelling in graphic design. Whether handmade or digital, the lettering should be easy on the eye and well placed. It should help tell the story and do nothing to get in the way of it.

Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take.

Communication is not about speaking what we think. Communication is about ensuring others hear what we mean.

Graphic design was largely about communication in an artistic or creative manner, much like writing is used to convey ideas. Many designers completely miss that aspect of the "art." Some are completely satisfied with just making things pretty, without taking the communication element into consideration.

Graphic Design, which fulfills aesthetic needs, complies with the laws of form and exigencies of two-dimensional space; which speaks in semiotics, sans-serifs, and geometrics; which abstracts, transforms, translates, rotates, dilates, repeats, mirrors, groups, and regroups, is not good design if it is irrelevant.

I began to see that the short texts I was writing were poster material.

Of course, I did lots of what would be called graphic design now, what used to be called commercial art.

Providing, meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures - it is the designer's job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting.

I feel that every day, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless; it literally pours in.

My first job in Brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards, and based on speed, angle of approach and actually blocks of text. It was very - actually, it was a very good study, and got me a job in an ad agency. And they also decided that I had to - to give me a very ugly Plexiglas trophy for it.

As an artist, as I design and lay out a page, the less-important things, things I want you to spend less time looking at, I draw them very small, maybe even silhouette them. The more-important pivotal scenes, I draw them larger, maybe even a double-page spread.