Born: 1955

Education: San Diego State University

Currently resides: Folly Beach, South Carolina

Selected honors: Designer of the Year, International Center for Photography, New York; Member, Alliance Graphique Internationale

The edgy, provocative work of David Carson has challenged the tenets of 20th-century graphic design and helped to usher the art of communication into the 21st century. Educated in sociology, Mr. Carson is a self-taught designer who defines his own working process as subjective and intuitive. Newsweek magazine said in a feature article on Carson, “he changed the public face of graphic design.”

David Carson Design, Inc., with offices in New York and Los Angeles, includes Fox Television, at&t, Sony, Pepsi, Nike, British Airways, American Express, mtv, and Quiksilver among its clients. In recent years, Mr. Carson has branched out from print into commercials, videos, and short films. He also has been active in the music world, designing the award-winning packaging and photography for Nine Inch Nails’s The Fragile. The Puerto Rican magazine Surf in Rico is designed by David Carson in homage to his beginnings as a professional surfer, and his revolutionary design work on Ray Gun magazine was hailed by Chicago’s American Center for Design as the most important work coming out of America.

David Carson is the co-author, with Lewis Blackwell, of the top-selling monograph The End of Print. Mr. Carson currently serves as the art director and designer for the Marshall McLuhan estate and recently released The Book of Probes, a collaboration of McLuhan’s words and Carson’s design. He just released his fourth design book, TREK, highlighting the past five years of work, teaching, and travel.

Additionally, Mr. Carson is the creative director of the Gibbes Musuem of Art in Charleston, South Carolina.