Late last year I decided to try this David Carson Masterclass all the ads seemed to target me with. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the huge amount of work I was doing since the very beginning of the year, feeling a little insecure about myself as a designer. Mind you I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years now, but I don’t know, I guess I’ve never worked so many long hours in a single year, resolving design problem after design problem, so much so that I had a hard time finding the space to study. It was not that I was feeling stuck, quite the contrary, I was just coming out of a very successful visual identity launch at work. But I felt no less insecure than… well, than as I always was. Still, it felt like I was too exhausted to fight this feeling. Like, so tired that I just gave up and started to really doubt my whole career. Anyway, in my early days as an art director, Carson was one of the designers that impressed me the most —he disregards for all the classical rules and that street-raw quality to his work really spoke to me. Well now, I should confess that I’m sucker for grids and typography rules, BUT, at the time to see such a confrontational attitude towards those rules and, better yet, to have incredible work coming out of it. Wow, this guy was something else. I remember watching a video about him, it might have been that “All for a few good waves” documentary, where he said something along the lines of “you don’t need to know the rules to create something, I never learned them and here I am”. This idea still comes back and forth in my brain every now and then. So I decided to take these classes at a slow pace so not to stress myself, using some of my vacation days to start it and just finishing the last assignment today. Well, the first project was to design a piece using our first names. Following what David introduced in the first classes, I came up with this, and you know what, it really helped valeu myself a little more.
#graphicdesign
