Perverse Optimist

" To me, nothing is more v i b r a n t than having the power to do something but not having the e x p e r i e n c e of knowing what's right and what's wrong." 
 TIBOR KALMAN








Kalman was best known for the groundbreaking work he created with his New York design firm, M&Co, and his brief yet influential editorship of Colors magazine. Throughout his 30-year career, Kalman brought his restless intellectual curiosity and subversive wit to everything he worked on -- from album covers for the Talking Heads to the redevelopment of Times Square. Kalman incorporated visual elements other designers had never associated with successful design, and used his work to promote his radical politics. The influence of his experiments in typography and images can be seen everywhere, from music videos to the design of magazines such as Wired and Ray Gun.
Kalman was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1949 and emigrated to US with his family in 1956.From 1968 he worked for the one-store company that eventually became the Barnes & Noble bookshop empire, creating window displays, store designs, signs and advertisements. Tibor Kalman founded the legendary, multidisciplinary design firm M&Co in 1979. In collaboration with his wife Maira, the conceptually progressive firm initially worked on whatever commercial projects it could get before moving towards the cultural sector and the creation of content and form in all areas of graphic design, as well as industrial design, film titles, television spots, children's books and architecture. The Kalman's social concerns and reactions to contemporary attitudes resulted in products that are enjoyed internationally as they address contemporary issues, including time (5 o'clock really is the most important time for many of us) and garbage (crumpled paper can have a real nice look). Kalman was art director of Artforum from 1987-88 and creative director of Interview from 1989-91. In autumn 1990 he was recruited as editor-in-chief of a controversial new Benetton magazine, Colors. He produced five issues in new York before closing M&Co in 1993 and moving to Rome, where he edited eight more issues. In September 1995 Kalman quit Colors and returned to New York to consider new directions.
Tibor saw himself as a social activist for whom graphic design was a means of achieving two ends: good design and social responsibility. Good design, which he defined as “unexpected and untried,” added more interest, and was thus a benefit, to everyday life. Second, since graphic design is mass communication, Tibor believed it should be used to increase public awareness of a variety of social issues.He urged clients like Restaurant FIorent to use the advertising M&Co created for them to promote political or social messages. He devoted M&Co’s seasonal self-promotional gifts to advocate support for the homeless.
In the last years of his life, despite his illness, Kalman enjoyed a remarkable period of productivity. In addition to doing smaller projects with M&Co, he oversaw the creation of two books: "Chairman Rolf," a tribute book for furniture designer Rolf Fehlbaum (1997, Princeton Architectural Press), and his own retrospective, the Hall and Bierut book "Perverse Optimist."
Today, the influence of M&Co is still strong, both as a result of its work and that of the many designers, like Stefan Sagmeister, Stephen Doyle, Alexander Isley, Scott Stowell, and Emily Oberman, who worked there and went on to start their own design studios, also in New York City. Tibor Kalman was a member o Alliance of Graphique Internationale (AGI). Until his death (1999 - Puerto Rico), Kalman was married to the illustrator and author Maira Kalman.
<< Of the two names that changed design in the ’80s and ’90s — Mac and Tibor — one changed the way we work, the other the way we think. The former is a tool, the latter was our conscience. >>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibor_Kalman
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-tiborkalman
http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=30&fid=167
http://www.salon.com/people/obit/1999/05/19/kalman/
http://www.typotheque.com/articles/tibor_kalman.html