Certainly most other surfing magazines were void of distinguished design.
Since surfing is such a specialized activity and writing about it is arcane,
one would hardly have expected a surf magazine to be typographically
innovative or risqué.
Beach Culturewas born out of a two-hundred-page annual
advertorial called Surf Stylethat included puff pieces about the products
advertised therein. Carson embraced the publisher’s idea to make Surf Style
into a real magazine. This former design intern at Surfer publications,
former art director of Skateboardmagazine and Musician, had studied
typography with designer Jean Robert in Switzerland and learned about the
power of vernacular forms and how type could be made expressive through
abstraction. After the premiere issue of Beach Culturemany advertisers
dropped out, confused by its odd mix of beach and culture, yet enough of
them remained to continue publishing. Carson seized the opportunity;
following in the footsteps of contemporary design progressives, such as
Wolfgang Weingart, Rudy VanderLans, Rick Valicenti, and Neville Brody,
he began his own expedition into new—and often illegible—realms of
visual presentation. Carson’s spin on typographic anarchy was different than
his predecessors. He not only infused his pages with wit and irony, but also
accepted that a magazine page is ephemera.
In one issue he ran a story in three conventional columns of type,
but rather than reading the traditional way, vertically down, it read
horizontally across with each sentence jumping from one column to the
next. “Usually, I take my design cue from the story or art,” said Carson, “but
this time I just did it to have fun. Once the reader caught on I’m sure they
had fun too.” On another page Carson designed the page numbers to be
larger than the main headline, a joke in itself, but when the editor changed
the order of the pages, he kept the original number on the page because, he
explained, “I just happened to like it there.” In the final issue (of a total of
six) the page numbers were eliminated and jump-lines simply said
“continued.” These hijinks forced the reader to find his or her own way.
Initially, Carson used the newest Emigre typefaces. “I wanted to
use whatever was totally new and untried,” he explained. However, he
became more dependent on existing typefaces and published a “Special No
Emigre Font Issue” (a reference that went over the heads of most surfers).
“Emigre faces were becoming like clip art, too identifiable, too dated,” he
explained. “Beach Culturewas trying to be fresh, and I was using typefaces
that were appearing everywhere because they were hip and cool; it was just
too easy.”
Carson went further to make design that was difficult for his
readers andwriters. “In the beginning there were some writers who were
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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