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David Carson Analysis

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In terms of graphic design, there seems to be an ebb and flow between breaking boundaries and returning to a comfortable box of formality and normality. Much like art movements in general, there seems to be a yearning to return to the “classics,” or whatever movements that have come before, except this time they make it better, somewhat different, in order to keep up with the new technological advancements. As such, I feel that the graphic design style that David Carson exhibits is an elaboration of what the Futurists, such as Filippo Marinetti, had begun 71 years earlier. And though there is a fairly large gap between the two movements, they are more alike than you would think. The Futurist movement began back in 1909 when Filippo Marinetti …show more content…

To break the current conventions, he began to convey sound to the reader via the placement of the words in all their different fonts, sizes, etcetera. He actually began to experiment with typography in Poesia (Figure 2), a poetry magazine Marinetti began in 1905 before he even wrote his Futurism manifesto, where he wanted a revolution in poetry. Although, it is in his most famous work, the poem Zang Tumb Zumb (Figure 3), that he uses typographic style of design to convey the horrors of the Balkan war he had witnessed as a reporter. The chaos he beheld is depicted quite clearly through the different weights and styles of typeface he used. He said “It matters little if the deformed word becomes ambiguous It will marry itself to the abstract expression of an emotion of pure thought” (qtd. Bartram 21). He created a new language that was generally accessible for with this new array of type and original use of characters, .he colors a picture where the reader can grasp the meaning not only through the expressive words, but by its appearance as well. This symphony of sound and word not only enhances meaning on the individual word, but on the overall impact that the text has upon the reader, for “Noise is familiar to us. Noise has the power to bring us back to life” (Russolo 9). Marinetti wanted to …show more content…

We hear the words in our head as we scan them on a page, and we then use visual cues to help distinguish how they are meant to be read. Bold faces in Marinetti’s typography are meant to be overbearing noises, italics were used to depict a fast motion and white space for silence. Additionally, the placement and repetition of the words on the page added to this meaning. “Between poet and audience the same relationship exists as between two old friends. They can make themselves understood with half a word, a gesture, a glance. So the poet’s imagination must link distant things without conducting wires, using instead essential free words” (qtd. Bartram 20). Consider the concrete poem “ping pong” (Figure 4): the repeating words, as well as the descending lines of text, represent the bouncing of the ball as it travels away. This seeing and hearing dichotomy (Figure 5) helps us grasp the meaning, and allows us to link emotions and experiences via intuition. Marinetti plays with this concept in“Le soir, couchée dans son lit, elle relisait la lettre de son artilleur au front,” (Figure 6) where he give us a surreal glimpse into what it is like reading these kind of messages. As the woman, pictured bottom right, reads the letter from her lover in the war, she imagines that

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