Culture Change

Media End of Days Redux: Raygun Magazine

Over the holiday I came across my beloved premiere issue of RayGun magazine (1992), and it took me back to my college days.

In 1986 I was a student at Missouri School of Journalism, working as a TA for Professor Paul Fisher (venerable typographer, professor of magazine design and founder of The Freedom of Information Center), and learning the art of design at the first junction of media’s identity crisis: the digital conversion to desktop publishing. Some of the recent distress journalists have felt in converging newsrooms is reminiscent of what those on the visual side experienced in the early days of our digital revolution. The world of typographers, designers, typesetters, and compositors changed forever; darkrooms went dark, and photographers, designers, and typographers lamented the rise of dilettante visual journalists with access to toys like the first Apple, Aldus Pagemaker, Laserprinters and the color Zerox.  It was the first wave of “citizen media” and almost no one welcomed it with open arms. The innovation of amateurs creating en masse was yet to be seen. Professionals and professors alike held their noses and predicted the demise of, well, just about everything we were learning in our secret society at Missouri (there’s a reason they call it the Missouri Mafia). But for a student with a copy of Pagemaker, a $2000 Apple (I may still be paying that off on a credit card somewhere) and access to a color zerox, it was a sweet world.

But not so sweet for Paul Fisher. While I had reverence for the distinguished professor — he taught me the discipline and art of the letterform, editing by design, visual journalism and the nonlinear, associative power of design as a meta narrative. But he was a digital naysayer and disdained the underground media and typographic grunge that flourished in those early days. I distinctly remember vowing, as only a 22-year-old can, to never get cranky, anxious or dismissive of change. How could he not LOVE the messy possibility, I wondered. But his obsession with legibility was at odds with the impressionistic new forms of design in distress. And it was that very distress, the post-modern deconstruction – the destruction – of the letterform that characterized the exquisite design of David Carson’s music culture zine RayGun, published as an alternative music culture scene to Rolling Stone and Spin. And sure enough, art director David Carson was exactly what professionals feared: a dilettante with little formal training, a surfer icon that transformed communication design in the 90s with a zerox machine and damaged type. His was, indeed, meta design. His experimental, layered and virtually illegible work communicated precisely without a precision of form. It was groundbreaking for me as a young journalist and introduced me to the possibilities of associative, nonlinear and layered meaning in ways that perfectly anticipated the internet. It also acclimated me to a lurching ride of change as technology intersected with both aesthetics and narrative forms. It continues to be a thrilling ride.

This is my first official post to this blog. We will continue to examine new media’s narrative forms, the accelerating blurring of boundaries between professionals and amateurs, and to both critically and enthusiastically examine the next, the next, and the next…

© 2009 mediadocumenta.