Member-only story
David Carson’s New Direction
Not just the branding, the product itself.
In the middle of the night, searching for something to eat in an Omicron-empty Hong Kong airport, I finally came across an open duty-free shop where, front and center, the words The MACALLAN David Carson Concept №3 in black type in a white rectangle jumped out of a painterly collage of images. Was I hallucinating? Could this display, this packaging, have been designed by the David Carson, the bad boy who more than 30 years ago rocked the design world with Beach Culture and Ray Gun? The David Carson whose iconoclastic work was debated on the pages of every design magazine. Who was a 2014 AIGA Medalist, but who recently was the subject of a new outcry when MasterClass — where Martin Scorsese teaches filmmaking and Annie Leibowitz teaches photography — chose him to teach graphic design. Some people thought the instructor should be “someone who really knows how to design”
After viewing the display from every angle and chatting with the shop manager about how sales were doing — “very well” — I decided to take a deep dive into what’s being said and written about Carson these days. After grabbing chips and a soda from the vendor across the corridor, I quickly learned that Carson Limited Edition whiskey is a big hit in Asian capitals and the subject of breathy articles in Chinese lifestyle magazines. And…
