David Carson Quotes

Design has become a universal medium for expressing ideas, raising fundamental questions, and addressing social challenges.

I really do believe that art changes the landscape of the world.

I look at graphic design as communication, meaning that the work has to have a vibe to connect to the viewer or perceiver. I make a black and white drawing and then add color digitally, bringing in a contemporary pattern to the composition to create a vibrance.

A graphic designer, you know, who understands ideas and understands that ideas are what makes the world go round, could change the world with a magazine. If one talent could do it right now, and everybody would stop saying it's the death of magazines.

This is what I like about being a designer: You can't really get it until you see it.

I wanted to be a writer as a teen... so storytelling was my first love. In my late teens, design became an obsession as I realized that I could express myself through the medium. Much later, when I founded Fuseproject in 1999, our slogan became 'design brings stories to life.'

To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it

The artist has tremendous power to change the world.

Art isn't supposed to change the world, but it can.

Artists have the unique ability to tell stories. It's not charts and graphs that get people to change.

One song isn't going to ever change things, but I suppose it's the accumulation of music generally [that is]. If you can imagine a world that has no music in it, it would be a very different world, so music does change the world by virtue of all the music in it. Cumulative music of every kind, from banging a drum to playing a flute or recording symphonies, or singing 'War, what is it good for?' All those things change the whole way we live.

How can art make a difference in the world?

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.

Musicians have the power to influence people and along with movie makers, they can reach and influence more people than any group of people, more than scientists and certainly more than politicians.

Artists reach areas far beyond the reach of politicians. Art, especially entertainment and music, is understood by everybody, and it lifts the spirits and the morale of those who hear it.

Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.

I like the idea that people get engaged thinking about design, about creativity. I don't see how it could possibly be bad.

It was difficult to get into my friends' rock bands when I was a teenager. They somehow didn't see the need for an accordion player. That's when I realized that I had to find my own path in life.

You can't kill Rock 'n' Roll. It's here to stay

I used to do jacket design, and I'm very conscious of covers, and probably meddle more than other authors would.

That's always been Guillermo's preference, is to have as much there practically as is humanly possible, and that digital graphic images are more a punctuation mark than they are a replacement.

No matter what happens in the future, rock and roll will save the world.

There are all the offsprings of people who are influenced by punk. It sounds completely different - but it's still rock 'n' roll. When hip-hop came on the scene, it was the last legitimate creation of a new genre.