David Carson's Uncovensional Designs - Ray Gun Magazine

Ray Gun was an American alternative rock-and-roll magazine, published in 1992. Led by art director David Carson, Ray Gun explored experimental magazine and unconvensional design. The result was a chaotic, abstract style, not always readable, but distinctive in appearance. This can have advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I think it could be risky having unreadable sell lines, as people are drawn to the contents, as well as the look of the front cover. There have been issues with out of focus images, and traditionally, blurred images would be scrapped immediatly as the audience can't clearly see the talent on the front.
Furthur into my research, I found a few artists that have been written about in the magazine. At first, I thought this magazine (like others) wouls stick to one (or 2 similar) genres. I found artists like, Radiohead and Eminem have been in the magazine. These artists are very different and their genres of must are also very contradictory. This means that it doesn't appeal to just one target market, but alot of different people interested in different music. Instead, each issue, would appeal to a different audience each month, given the artists on the cover and on the inside of the magazine. I also studied a front cover of Ray Gun Magazine and found some very interesting and unconvensional aspects.



Firstly, I noticed the barcode, positioned on its side in the middle of the page. I researched some other magazines and didn't find any others that did the same thing or something similar. This is also the only addition of Ray Gun that I found that did this. I also saw that some letters have been replaced with numbers which is very unconvensional and edgy. None of the talent have a direct mode of address, most magazines would use a direct mode of address as it creates eye contact between the reader and artist. Also, some parts of some letters have been rubbed out, but this could make it look unclear and people could be put off by this. The sell lines are not placed around the side of the main image like they usually are, and there are large gaps inbetween words and letters.

I saw that all the issues of the magazines are very different and this could make it unreconisable. The vast majority of music magazines use the same fonts in the title and this makes it eye catching and fimiliar.

                                      

These 2 images of Ray Gun magazine (found on the internet), are examples of the fact each issue is very different from the others and there are very few similarities between them. This could be an advantage as people could be interested to see what the newest issue looks like, but this could make it very difficult to recognise without having to study the front cover well. Some issues don't even have a bar code on the front. The issue on the right does, but the issue on the left doesnt. One is very cartoon like and the other is a photograph of a person. Different colour schemes and fonts are used.