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Adobe.com: So what's the client and project list now? You seem to be terribly busy.
Carson: Just a weird mix of things. I'm just finishing the second edition of "The End of Print" for the five-year anniversary. Last I heard, it sold over 150,000 copies.
Adobe.com: It's made you pretty well known.
Carson: Within a small world, I guess. I'm also doing three logos; two are for Web sites, one is for a corporation. I'm doing the type for a TV commercial for a new pain reliever, and I'm starting to work on a Web site for a company called Adventurefront.com.
Adobe.com: What do you find different about the Web? Are you enjoying it?
Carson: I've kind of stayed away from it up till now. I did a site for MGM Studios three or four years ago and it was really frustrating and slow and restrictive. I didn't enjoy the project or think it ended up in a particularly great place. It was reasonable, but I just found it frustrating. So at that point, I shifted toward motion graphics, video direction, and film. But now, with the [emergence of] broadband and streaming capabilities, the Web is going to get a lot better real quick.
Adobe.com: What do you think of the Web today?
Carson: I haven't done a lot of surfing on the Net, which will hopefully turn out to be an advantage. There are sites that people tell me to look at, and they're usually cool. I see elements of print design all over the Web — a lot of drop shadows and small type. Even though I don't look much, I still haven't seen anything that just makes you say, "Whoa, where did that come from?" So we'll see.
Adobe.com: You mean, we'll see if you can do something that makes people say "whoa"?
Carson: [Adventurefront] could turn out to be deadly, but it's an experiment. When I did Raygun and Beach Culture, I was always very involved in the copy, assigning a lot of the articles, writing the headers. I've realized this is the opportunity to do a similar thing on the Web. I'll have a lot of say on the articles and content and editorial, which is how I've always operated.
Adobe.com: You mentioned "The End of Print." How is the second edition going?
Carson: I had a standing joke when the book first came out: If I had any idea it was going to sell, I would have made a much better book. I really had no idea. Even so, I think it's held up pretty well. However, I wanted to add some work to the new edition that was good but didn't get in the first edition. So I went back and revisited my old issues of Raygun and Beach Culture and I was struck with how many bad pages there were, especially in Raygun. I'm not too surprised in a sense, because for me the more successful magazine (and the one that holds up better) is Beach Culture. I think I'm happier with those six issues as a complete work, probably more than any single issue of Raygun. It's also all I was doing at that time. So Beach Culture holds up pretty well, but with Raygun, god, there were a lot of really bad pages.
Adobe.com: Then, there's your latest book, "Fotografiks." When I first looked at it, I thought I knew exactly what it was about, that I understood how you traveled. However, after looking at it four or five times, I realize that's absolutely not the case.
Carson: There's a really good quote in there by Phil Meggs, who says something to the effect of "I've been to that city and that's nothing I remember about that city. That's not the Atlanta I saw." And that's kind of what the book is about: discovering things that are out there, not designing them, not making them, just discovering them. There's a lot out there, and everyone is going to discover something different, and that's what makes it interesting.
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