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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

David Carson Quotes

I’m a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that’s sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting – whatever it is.

– David Carson

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.

– David Carson

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.

– David Carson

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.

– David Carson

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.

– David Carson

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.

– David Carson

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.

– David Carson

My background is sociology. Combined with my graphic approach, if I could do some film projects, I think I’d be very good at making documentaries eventually, but people don’t think of me for that, of course. But dialogue is something I know I can be good at.

– David Carson

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.

– David Carson

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.

– David Carson

As we get more technically driven, the importance of people becomes more than it’s ever been before. You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience.

– David Carson

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.

– David Carson

My site is a little unorthodox without being totally inaccessible.

– David Carson

The dreaded phrase in design circles is ‘show and tell.’

– David Carson

Overall, people are reading less.

– David Carson