Design for a Change

“When you make something no one hates, no one loves it.”- Tibor Kalman, Wired Magazine

Dec. 1996

Tibor Kalman considered himself an “anti-designer designer” (or un-designer). He claimed to hate the goal of selling, and thought that graphic design could be better utilized to increase awareness on a variety of social issues.

Born in Budapest, Hungary on July 6, 1949, Kalman emigrated to the U.S. with his family at the age of seven, following the Soviet invasion of his home country; the family settled in Poughkeepsie, New York. He went on to attend New York University, studying journalism and history during the radical political era of the late 1960s. During this time, Kalman also began working at the Student Book Exchange, a college bookstore that went on to become Barnes & Noble. In 1970 he drops out of NYU to cut sugarcane in the “Ten Million Harvest” in Cuba. After a year, he returns to New York, and resumes working at the bookstore. 

Kalman starts creating window displays, signs, and ads, and goes on to create Barnes & Noble’s original bookplate trademark. He is named creative director of the company’s in-house design department, and helps establish their visual identity.

In 1979 Kalman founds M&Co. with several other avant garde design students in New York City. The company works for a diverse list of clients—from banks and real estate, to rock bands and museums. Shunning the idea of “pretty design,” the company challenges the rules of contemporary graphic design—preferring to create work that removes all decoration and style, appearing more handmade: a form of non-design. The company delves into graphics, film, titles, TV spots, magazines, architectural design, and the creation of their own products, stressing the idea of social responsibility.

Earning a reputation as the “bad boy of graphic design,” in the late 1980s Kalman goes on to serve as an art and creative director for such influential magazines as Art Forum and Interview.  In 1990 he is recruited by Italian photographer Olivero Toscani to become the founding editor-in-chief of Colors, a magazine sponsored by the clothing company Benetton, known for its controversial advertisements. The assignment is well-suited for the known provocateur, and Kalman creates content that stresses the idea of multiculturalism and global awareness, including such topics as race, AIDS, and the environment.

After leaving Colors in 1995, Kalman continues to work with his wife/illustrator Maira Kalman, and serves as a design consultant on a number of communications, exhibitions, and cultural projects, including the redesign of Times Square. He dies on May 2, 1999 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, after complications from non-Hodgkins Lymphonia. According to writer Steven Heller, Kalman is remembered as a designer who critiqued the very nature of consumption and production, mixing “modernist social responsibility and post-modernist introspection.”

Sources:  Tibor Kalman: Design and Undesign, Liz Farrelly, 1998. Watson-Guptil • www.aiga.org/medalist-tiborkalman • www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/2004/?id=196 • www.charlierose.com/view/interview/4543