Factor MONZA RCC + David Carson Edition

To mark the 10th anniversary of the Rapha Cycle Club, Rapha, Factor, and renowned graphic designer David Carson have teamed up to create a very special RCC capsule collection, which not only includes Rapha cycling kit, but also hoodies, musettes, caps, socks, and a matching Factor MONZA.

Rapha has a rich history of creative collaborations, partnering with leaders in art and culture on capsule collections across their 20 year history. This latest joint venture with David Carson, who has had a seminal influence on graphic and visual design, brings his bold, colourful style to the typically conservative world of road cycling.

Applying David Carson’s design to the Factor MONZA completes the picture and makes this the ultimate RCC capsule collection.

A meeting of creative minds

“I’m always excited when the creative team at Rapha reaches out to us for a collaboration. But this one with David Carson meant even more. With his convention-defying design work on Raygun Magazine and his book, The End of Print, David was a huge influence on me as a young designer at college,” Factor’s Creative Director, Jay Gundzik explained.

“He’s legitimately my design hero. Growing up in the 80s, I was really into skateboarding, surfing, and music. And David Carson was a pioneer in design in those subcultures. He used Raygun as a platform for his unorthodox graphic design style. It was so gritty and contemporary and definitely had a certain skate feel to it, but it also had a contemporary fine art vibe as well.”

Transferring Carson’s unique vision onto the RCC capsule collection turned into an exciting shared creative process for all sides. “From the start, we gave David Carson complete creative freedom. The brief was simple: put the Rapha Cycling Club through his process. We supplied a suite of brand materials: photographs, typefaces, colours, symbols - and he went to work. Using his signature methods of collage, found materials, and deconstruction, Carson shared sketches that we refined together, always keeping his distinctive visual language at the centre.” Stephen Dalley, Senior Brand Designer, Rapha

Whenever Factor’s creative team has a chance to work with equally imaginative and experimental artists and designers, it opens up a whole world of opportunities to develop something really special. “It was like a dream come true, to work on a design for a bike with David Carson, I don’t think you could find a more excited person anywhere in the world to do that than I was,” Jay continued.

“It was challenging, though. I didn’t get to work directly with David. What he had done was provide an overarching creative direction to the Rapha team and they took it and iterated off his creative direction, which is what I did too for the bike design.”

Working creatively in parallel unison like that can be complicated, especially when the artists are spread around the globe from the North American west coast to the east coast, onto Britain and Taiwan. Making sure all parties are aligned can be tricky. But with the expert graphic artists and designers both available within Rapha’s company and Factor, interpreting David Carson’s creative direction feels comparable to session musicians expertly riffing off each other on a jazz album.

David Carson’s impact on visual and graphic arts the past decades has meant that he has had the opportunity to work with everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Yale University. Getting into the Rapha and RCC headspace was part of his process in creating his design for this 10th anniversary capsule collection: “I was fortunate to visit the Clubhouse Mallorca and was so impressed with the camaraderie there, cyclists just hanging out having coffee, the whole vibe. I read everything I could about the brand. I started playing with the letters R.C.C, added some rider shots, experimenting with patterns, colours and crops. I played with the logo itself, then added more imagery, some in poster format that we later customised to the various products.”

Transferring 2D designs to 3D frames

Jay Gundzik was in charge of making sure David Carson’s vision would be faithfully transferred to the MONZA frame. “I was given their files and interpreted it for the bike, but it also had to match the kit too. It had to feel like part of the collection. There were some strongly defined boundaries as far as the design. But I actually like working in that way because it forces you to think very carefully about your design choices, composition, colour,” Jay explained. “I wanted the frame to feel like an extension of their kit collection, but also unique.”

Clearly, RCC, David Carson, and Factor are three distinct identities. Allowing each side to express, translate and adapt is a quintessential example of prime creative collaboration, especially considering the different mediums used. Not only is it a question of transferring the design to the high tech cycling kit from Rapha, but also soft goods like hoodies and musettes, and of course the Factor MONZA carbon frame. Ensuring the colours from the RCC + David Carson collection translated perfectly onto the MONZA is not as straightforward as it might seem.

“We tried to match the tube colours to the RCC kit as closely as possible, which isn’t really easy to do when you are dealing with two completely different materials. But we got as close as we could,” Jay explained.

Once the colour samples from the cycling clothing were perfectly matched and recreated on the MONZA, actually transferring the design to the frame is equally challenging. The images and graphics need to be mapped and properly spaced all around the tube shapes. Doing it once is one thing, doing it on a production level is quite different. “It’s mapped all the way around the tube surface, which from a production standpoint is really hard to do,” Jay confirmed. “I mean, if you are going to make one or even ten bikes, it’s not that hard to do it consistently. But to do it on a full production scale is very difficult.”

But epic paint jobs have always been an area where Factor excels. “Our production and paint team is top. We have a really great production artist, Jay Liao,” Jay Gundzik said. “He figured out the step-by-step decal application process to make it as consistent as possible. Once the design was done and the team signed off on it, I worked closely with him to get the artwork to a place where the painters and decal appliers could work on it.”

Though you have perhaps seen videos from multiple brands where bikes are being sprayed with a variety of paints, this process of nailing down the David Carson design to fit on a frame appropriately resembled a Carsonesque collage creation much more than a standard spray paint job. “It's one thing to have the design on your screen, but then actually to take it and apply it to a 3D surface consistently, that’s a big challenge and I couldn’t have done it without Jay Liao,” Jay explained. “We worked where I would send him art files and ask him to try it. He’d print it, mask it, literally tape it on the bike, then send me photos and we’d adjust it as needed.”

Why not try that?

Even if professional cycling feels like a laundry list of unwritten rules, the openminded creativity behind Factor bike designs is echoed and amplified by David Carson’s whole method of working and creating. “I grew up around surfing and skating culture in California, and I'm sure that helped me develop my approach of ‘why not try that?' Maybe open to more unexpected things while I work, questioning the rules,” he said. “It sounds a bit cliché, but trust your gut, trust your intuition. No one else in the world has your unique background, your whole life experience. Use that individuality and perspective in your work – no one else has that.”

Trusting your intuition often acts as a harbinger for success no matter the field, but especially in the visual arts. It’s what allows artists from a wide variety of backgrounds, expertises, and time zones to come together and create a capsule collection with the elegance and unique flair of this 10th anniversary RCC collection.

“I really love working with the Rapha team because they are super creative and they are really easy to work with. They don’t dictate a lot. They gave me a lot of creative freedom,” Factor’s Creative Director Jay Gundzik said. “I really tried to honour their design. I didn’t want to stray too far from what they had done; I just did my own interpretation of their kit using David Carson’s creative direction. I am really happy with the way the bike turned out. I hope David is happy.”

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