“Make something no one hates, no one loves it”- Tibor Kalman (post by Kristin Jordan)
Tibor Kalman- (July 6, 1949-May 2, 1999)
One of my favorite quotes by Tibor Kalman.
“We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right. Look at computers. Why are they all putty-colored or off-f******-white? You make something off-white or beige because you are afraid to use any other color - because you don’t want to offend anybody. But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it. So I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That’s what we really pay attention to anyway. We don’t talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing”.
Tibor Kalman was not afraid to make bold statements and to speak his mind through words or designs. I really like how risky he was with some of his designs to get his point across.
Tibor was a pretty talented designer and thinker. He was a
-Magazine Editor (Colors)
-Creative Director (Interview)
-Industrial and graphic design entrepreneur (M&Co)
-member of the Alliance Graphique International (AGI)
Clients
-Jenny Holzer, MTV, MOMA, Talking Heads, Chiat/Day, and NY’s 42nd Street Development Project
He was an American Graphic Designer of Hungarian origin.
Tibor was well known for his work as Editor in Chief of Colors Magazine.
Moved to the US to escape the Soviet invasion and attended New York University and dropped out of school after one year and started working at a small bookstore that would later become known as Barnes & Noble. He became the supervisor in their in-house design department.
Tibor started a design firm named M&Co with his wife Maira Kalman, which did work for clients like Limited Corporation, the New Wave music group Talking Heads and Restaurant Florent.
He also was a creative director of Interview magazine in the early 1990’s.
In 1993 Tibor closed M&Co to move to Rome to work with Colors magazine, a magazine that focused on multiculturalism and global awareness. They did this through bold graphic Design, typography and photos and doctored images. Even a series in which high recognizable figures as the Pope and Queen Elizabeth were depicted as racial minorities. Kalman remained the main creative force behind Colors, until the onset of non-Hodgkins lymphoma forced him to leave in 1995, and return to New York. Tibor thinking about Colors Magazine was this: “Let’s face it: we live at a time when government is less and less powerful, less and less effective, and the agent of social change, at least for the immediate future, is the corporation. So people are going to have to figure out ways to co-opt corporations, to trick them into doing socially responsible things. Colors was a very good example of that. You could look at it as a progressive educator, making people think in new ways about race. Or, if you looked at it as a Benetton stockholder, you might say, “This is a really great way to reach the kids.”
In 1997 he reopened M&Co and continued to work until his did in 1999. He had a design work named, Tiborocity, it opened its US Tour at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A book was published about him and M&Co’s work entitled, Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 1999.
Some people who worked at M&Co were Stefan Sagmeister, Stephen Doyle, Alexander Isley, Scott Stowell, and Emily Oberman, they all went on to start their own design studios in NYC.
Tibor Kalman has a lot of intense Designs but I wasnt sure If i was aloud to post them on here because of language! LOL
