David Carson and William Caslon are two significant typographers in history, similar in their aims to break from the conservative and popular molds of their time, yet different in their approach to legibility.

Some would argue that David Carson is not a typographer, for he did not design a typeface but rather relied on the deconstruction of Émigré fonts, intuitively infusing them into abstraction that was to be more interpreted and admired than read. For this same reason, and the fact that he received no formal design education, leads some to argue that he is also not a true graphic designer.

In his early 20’s, Carson did receive a degree in Sociology and became a high school teacher teaching Sociology, Psychology, and Economics in Grants Pass, Oregon. It wasn’t until he attended a two week design course for high school students that he graphically designed anything, and the term was unknown to him until he was 26. The course led him to quit teaching and enroll in the San Diego State University design program. Less than a month later, he transferred to the Ashland College of Commercial Art in Oregon on the suggestion and financial funding of his grandmother. During his schooling there he sent out samples of his work to Paul Haven, an art director for Surfer Publications. Impressed with Carson’s work and dissatisfied with an associate art director working for him, Haven asked Carson to keep in touch while he worked on laying off the associate art director. Carson jumped the gun, quit school, moved back to San Diego, and worked for Haven as an unpaid intern until he was able to take over as the new associate art director. His assignment under the new promotion was to art direct Skateboarder magazine. The magazine struggled to restructure as the newly titled Actionnow and eventually ceased publication. Carson was laid off and went to work as a substitute teacher at the local high school, while also working on Transworld Skateboarding magazine on his days off and evenings. The 200 page monthly Transworld Skateboarding magazine, unlike Skateboarder, carried no budget, and relied heavily on the content generated by the skateboarding community. Carson was allowed ample room to creatively express. He soon juggled time between his soon-to-be full time position as a teacher and a full time workload for the magazine. In the middle of his second year teaching in California, he left to art direct for Musician magazine near Gloucester, Massachusetts. Despite raising newsstand sales with his unique art direction, after 18 issues he was laid off for being too extreme. Carson then went to work as an art director for Self magazine for less than a month, voluntarily resigning because he found the work boring.

Carson moved back to California to work on Beach Culture magazine, a magazine that covered surfing, local fashion, and music. Before it folded in 1991, Carson art-directed 6 issues, of which won over 150 design awards. While still working for Surfer magazine, Carson also began commissioned work for Ray Gun magazine, where he completely redesigned its layout and look and feel.

The Carson look and feel is all about deconstruction, comparable in some respects to the Dadaist movement. Carson’s work can be best described as raising “illegibility to an art form” (The Font of Youth). Type is distorted, blurred, twisted, cropped, and completely thrown out of whack. In Carson‘s designs, all things typography appear to be all things without rules. This is not to say they are without function or purpose. Carson works with an intuitive grid, playing type as form, and interacting type with image. Capital letters are mixed with lowercase, leading is experimented with, type is overlaid, and words are cropped, disjointed, and crammed into each other. It’s as if Carson sees type as not a body of content, but as expressionist content defined in its mere existence on the page. He knows how fickle and inattentive his audience, is. Do we really read this stuff? A Carson- designed 1994 spread in Ray Gun focuses more on a general message depicted by its design, than what we can read in its authored content. The article is written in the utterly undecipherable pictogram font of Zapf Dingbats. Carson addresses design as a voice, type as expression. In another Carson spread, this one about anonymous surfers, all the images have their heads cropped out. A spread about blind surfers is designed as two all black pages. As one designer said ” some of Carson’s work evokes the type play of Modernist maker Paul Rand” (Carson Ascendant). Part of the appeal of Carson’s work is that it comes across as spontaneous, expressionist, thought-provoking, and purposefully illegible.

Famous typographer William Caslon was purposefully legible. Caslon was born in 1692 in Worcestershire, England. In 1706 he began a six year apprenticeship with a London harness maker and then as an engraver of gunlocks and barrels. Caslon relied heavily on readily available Dutch fonts. In 1716 he opened his own engraving shop in London where he began to experiment with engraved type. His work came to the attention of printer John Walter and soon he was commissioned to cut type punches for various presses in London. In 1720, Caslon designed his first typeface, an “English Arabic” that was used in a Psalter and a New Testament. These printed materials were to accompany missionaries to the Far East. In 1722, Caslon cut the typeface that later became known, in 1726, under his namesake. The success of Caslon – its refined legibility – forwarded him enough funding to open up his own type foundry. His type foundry, which continued to operate for over 200 years, under the tutelage of his descendants, monopolized much of the typography industry in London from 1720-1780. Most English books bore his foundry’s typefaces. Caslon’s popularity spread and his typefaces can be seen throughout history on such articles as the Declaration of Independence and the Liberty Bell. In 1734, Caslon’s first specimen sheet rolled out with 47 roman and italic types in 14 different sizes.

Caslon‘s typefaces are loved because they are friendly, warm, legible, and easy on the eyes. Despite having delicate nuances, they are still very much elegantly refined. The Caslon foundry is responsible for over 1700 fonts – each character in each size once cut by hand into a metal punch. On inspection one would notice differences of various point sizes in lowercase letters such as the “e”. This has been something that has been difficult to emulate in recent digital renditions. The Caslon 540 Roman typeface has a slightly extended lowercase, a shorter x-height, and several notable discrepancies in lettering that provide indiscriminate variety. The capital Q has a unique swash-like tail. The apex of the capital A is quietly different, but elegant – a calligraphic notch. The capital T is broad and the teardrop terminals on the small case f and c are delicately full. The slightly heavier weight of thick strokes on Caslon typefaces add legibility and make them well-suited for body text.

Caslon, like Carson, was seen as having somewhat different design resolutions to commercial methods of his time. Caslon “modeled his letter on Dutch types, they were much better; for he introduced into his fonts a quality of interest, a variety of design, and a delicacy of modeling, which few Dutch types possessed” (Caslon Redux).

Caslon outreached his comfort zone, bringing a new awareness to the printing industry. Yet, unlike David Carson, Caslon’s different approach was more widely received and accepted. Regal and solid, Caslon type could be seen throughout the legal, governmental, and religious institutions of the world, and the printing industry was enamored. George Bernard Shaw refused any other typeface within his books.

Today, the Caslon type family remains resilient; a standard to look to. It is not unusual that several more modern fonts, such as Garamond and Benguit, find influence from it. Other typefaces such as ITC Caslon, struggle to replicate its intricacies.

David Carson’s typographic solutions, on the other hand, still continue to irritate parts of the design community. Carson’s work struggles to find a solid, respectable position. Carson’s lack of legibility is found as somewhat pretentious and without proper function. However, even so, it isn’t entirely revolutionary. “If you look back at the Dadaists and the futurists in the 1910’s” says ARTnews design director David Walter, “they were doing things that were more unreadable. And maybe Carson is not always so unreadable as “his readers rarely find insufficient optical contrast between type and background, and his messages are not beyond deciphering” (Carson Ascendant).

William Caslon and David Carson, one the master of refined legibility, and the other the guru of intuitive illegibility, had similar goals – each to break outside the confining boxes of what had become all too industry standards in their generation. Caslon tried to work out from under the monotonous form of Dutch engraved type, and Carson ignored the modernist grids of corporate design.