Monday, April 28th 2025
There was Rolling Stone, there was Spin—and then there was Ray Gun. If the first two were the establishment, Ray Gun was the Molotov cocktail. Launched in 1992 out of a one-bedroom in Beverly Hills by Marvin Scott Jarrett, this music magazine didn’t just cover the alternative scene—it was the alternative scene. Gritty, gorgeous, often illegible, and defiantly offbeat, Ray Gun felt like reading a zine while spiraling through a fever dream. It was a punk riot disguised as a print publication.
"Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does."
At the heart of it all? David Carson, the former surfer-turned-art-director who turned graphic design into visual anarchy. Forget grids, forget clean lines, forget readability—Carson weaponized type, tore up rules, and scattered them like confetti across the page. “Show, don’t tell” wasn’t a design philosophy, it was a dare. One issue famously ran an entire interview in Zapf Dingbats. Did it matter that no one could read it? Not really. You felt it.
“Ray Gun don’t give a fuck,” wrote Liz Phair in a recent retrospective, and she wasn’t wrong. Covers featured rock stars flipped upside down, faded into fog, or missing entirely. One early Bowie cover almost went to print featuring just his neck—Carson’s idea, not Jarrett’s. That one caused a creative breakup. “It’s just not working out anymore,” Jarrett faxed Carson. And just like that, the most iconic partnership in alt-magazine history disbanded.
But the damage (the good kind) was already done. Designers everywhere tried to mimic Carson’s chaotic genius, while readers devoured editorials like Goths on Acid or studied Björk’s cover like a sacred relic from a parallel dimension. The magazine didn’t just reflect culture—it distorted it, rewired it, and made it cooler. It even ran a Japan issue backwards, sold its front cover to Levi’s, and casually featured Nine Inch Nails on its final issue before folding in 2000.
For Carson, who once said, “Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does,” Ray Gun was proof of concept. And for a generation of creatives, it was the spark. As Brian Eno once said about the Velvet Underground, “Only a few people bought it, but everyone who did started a band.” Swap “band” for “design career,” and you’ve got Ray Gun.
So yes, some of the pictures came out blurry. But Ray Gun was never about clarity. It was about feeling something. Loudly.
All images attached to this article are not property of Lorem Ipsum and were crafted by the artists mentioned above.
