David Carson, one of the most influential designers of the 90's and today, whose work is described as continuing to be subjective and largely driven by intuition, with an emphasis on reading material before designing it, and experimenting with ways to communicate in a variety of mediums. Carson remains a hands on designer, keeping his studio small and mobile (DCD.com).
The controversial aspects of his work are based on his emphasis of readability vs legibility. He experimented a lot with pushing the reader farther into the visual realm of the page. He didn't speak simply to the reader, he spoke in an abstract language of scattered, layered, skewed, and at times absurdly composed text and images. Examples of all of these aspects of his work appeared while he was art director of Ray Gun magazine.
Notice how you don't get fed the information on the cover? You have to seek it out for yourself.
Critics of David Carson's work mainly say that his design was accidental, just experimenting and not using the principles of typography and design. They agree that it is indeed creative, and visually interesting to the reader though.
The basic difference here has been stated well by David Carson himself in a TED Talk. Don't mistake legibility for communication. Just becuase something's legibly doesn't mean 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 TED Talk).
I could definitely see some serious controversy within the design field. I like how you blogged about one that isn't as straight forward or talked about. It's sort of a controversy in terms of technique and not so much the content. I really like how the designer you talked about was really abstract in his techniques and really tries to be unique in his approach. This is not only really cool, but also inspiring because it is a way to show other designers to think outside of the box and go places really never gone before. I always enjoy reading about the design blogs you post so keep it up holmes!
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