The Maverick and the Malt
David Carson’s enduring collaboration with The Macallan reveals a shared devotion to intuition, imperfection and the human hand
When a graphic designer celebrated for shredding the rulebook joins forces with a Scottish distillery approaching its third century, the collision yields something unusual on both sides. David Carson—a former professional surfer who reshaped visual communication as art director of Ray Gun in the 1990s—built his reputation on a disregard for conventional grids and an instinctive, almost tactile approach to layout. The Macallan, meanwhile, has spent generations refining a single category of spirit with a near-monastic attention to provenance.
In June 2025, Carson reimagined the visual identity for The Macallan’s core ranges, the aptly named Timeless Collections. The launch was a marker rather than a conclusion. What has emerged in the months since is a sustained creative dialogue rooted in a shared philosophy: a willingness to experiment, an obsession with small things and an insistence on the human touch.
Producing single malt and crafting experimental typography may appear unrelated, but Carson sees a clear through-line. Both pursuits demand a tolerance for the unknown. As he explained in a conversation about the partnership, success in either field depends on “keeping humanness involved and being open to experiment and nothing, nothing on automatic”.
That refusal of the automatic has shaped Carson’s career, earning him recognition including the AIGA Gold Medal. It also maps neatly onto how The Macallan thinks about whisky-making. During a tour of the distillery in Speyside, Carson recalled meeting a worker whose multi-generational family role was to walk the aisles each day inspecting casks for leaks—pausing, occasionally, to notice the way light fell across the barrels. The grounded, manual quality of that work resonated with a designer who still prefers to crouch on the floor and collage physical elements shifting them fractions of an inch before ever opening a file on a screen.
Carson came to design without formal training; his degree is in sociology. He approaches corporate commissions through feel rather than framework. “The only starting point for me is to take the information I’ve been given, whether it’s an article or whether there’s images or if it’s music… and then I’m processing all that information and saying, what would that look like? What am I getting from all this?” he shared.
For The Macallan, that meant absorbing the history of the ingredients, the palette of the estate and the temperaments of the whisky makers themselves, then translating all of it into visual form. The process famously culminated in Carson scattering hundreds of mixed-media paintings, many of them saturated in red, across the floor of a sizable Barcelona workspace. The brand’s creative leadership, rather than recoiling from the sprawl, embraced it.
One of the more telling aspects of the ongoing work is how readily the distillery met Carson on his own terms. He has long been known for embedding small, easily missed details—Easter eggs, in his vocabulary—into his compositions. The Macallan responded in kind. During the final meeting for a special release, an executive asked Carson, almost in passing, if he had a favorite number. He answered eight. The team adjusted the spirit accordingly. The bottle bearing Carson’s name is filled at exactly 40.8% ABV, an instance of the artwork shaping the liquid as much as the liquid shapes the artwork.
For all the heritage of a two-century-old house and the stature of a designer with a defining body of work behind him, the collaboration carries a notable lightness. On his visit to Speyside, Carson spent part of his time skating the distillery grounds. He considers that ease essential to making anything worthwhile. “I think it sends kind of a nice message,” he said. “You know, we can take our work seriously, but maybe ourselves not overly serious. But then it’s at the end of the day. It’s hopefully about having fun.”
Trends pass. Releases sell through. The relationship Carson has built with The Macallan is structured to outlast both. He places the work alongside his collaborations with Nine Inch Nails and Beach Culture magazine as among the most rewarding of a career spanning more than three decades. The Timeless Collections redesign was one visible expression of something larger: a partnership sustained by genuine pleasure and a shared respect for making things by hand. As Carson put it, summarizing the disposition that has carried him this far: “I make my living from my hobby. It doesn’t seem like work…”
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