This article, posted in Print Magazine as a republishing of a 2001 article about Tibor Kalman, focuses on the intent behind Kalman’s radical work. This article is an important follow up to the manifesto I examined previously, unpacking a little more from someone who knew Kalman personally. The article takes an in depth look into his earlier years (prior to Colors, which I have been investigating primarily), and looks at some untold and previously unseen stories of his radical activism. It again really helps transform my idea of him as a designer, seeing that the most important thing for him was not the design itself but the intent behind it and the story it told.
...In the mid-1980s two names changed graphic design: Mac and Tibor. The former needs no introduction. Nor, with various books and articles by and about him, does the latter. Tibor Kalman, who died on May 2, 1999 after a courageously long battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was one of the few graphic designers whose accomplishments were legend within the field and widely known outside as well. Tibor may not be as influential on the daily practice of graphic design as Mac, but his sway over how designers think, indeed how they define their roles in culture and society, is indisputable. For a decade he was the design profession’s moral compass and its most fervent provocateur.
Not since the height of American Modernism during the late 1940s and 1950s had one designer prodded other designers to take responsibility for their work as designer-citizens. With a keen instinct for public relations, a penchant for Barnum-like antics, and a radical consciousness from his days as an SDS organizer, by the late 1980s Tibor became known as (or maybe he even dubbed himself) the “Bad Boy” of graphic design.
When the clothing company Esprit, which had prided itself as socially liberal and environmentally friendly, was awarded the 1986 AIGA Corporate Leadership Award, an irate Tibor anonymously distributed leaflets during the awards ceremony at the AIGA National Conference in San Francisco protesting the company’s exploitation of Asian laborers. Tibor believed that award-winning design involved the entire corprorate ethic and argued that “many bad company’s have great design.” Two years later, as co-chair with Milton Glaser of the AIGA Conference, “Dangerous Ideas,” in San Antonio, he admonished designers to question the effects of their work on the environment and refuse to accept any client’s product at face value. As an object lesson and act of hubris, he challenged designer Joe Duffy to an impromptu debate about a full page advertisement that he and his then partner, British corporate designer Michael Peters, had placed in the Wall Street Journal promoting their services to Fortune 500 corporations. While most designers admired this promotional effort, Tibor insisted that the ad had “sold-out” to corporate capitalism and insured mediocrity. This outburst was the first, but not the last, where Tibor criticized another designer in public for perceived misdeeds. By the early 1990s, Tibor also had written (or collaborated with others in writing) numerous finger-wagging manifestos that exposed the pitfalls of what he sarcastically called “professional” design.
Tibor saw himself as a social activist for whom graphic design was a means to achieve two ends. First, 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, it should be used to appeal to public awareness on a variety of social issues. His own design firm, M&Co, which started selling conventional “design by the pound” to banks and department stores, was transformed in the mid-1980s into a soap box for his social mission.
He urged clients, like Restaurant Florent, to use the advertising that M&Co had created for them to promote political or social messages. He devoted M&Co’s seasonal self-promotional gifts to advocate support for homelessness. Rather than send the usual offerings, one Christmas he mailed out over 300 small cardboard boxes filled with the typical contents of a homeless shelter’s barely nutritional meal (a sandwich, cracker, candy bar, etc.) and offered to match any contributions that the recipients made to a homelessness agency. The following year he sent a book peppered with facts about poverty along with twenty dollars and a stamped envelope addressed to a another charity.
Tibor was criticized for using homelessness as a public relations ploy to garner attention for M&Co. And indeed he was a master at piquing public interest in just this way. But he was also ingenuous. Perhaps the impulse came from his childhood, when as a seven year old Hungarian immigrant fleeing the Communists he and his family were displaced — virtually homeless — in a new land. Although he became more American than most natives, he never forgot the time when he was an alien.
Although he savored the nuances of type, and had a fetish for vernacular design — the untutored or quotidian signs, marquees, billboards, and packages that comprise mass culture — he understood that connoisseurship meant nothing unless the deeds it engendered supported a message that led to action. Even most stylistic work must be viewed in the context of Tibor’s persistence. Everything had to have meaning and resonance. A brochure for a real estate developer, like Red Square, an apartment building on the [now gentrified] Lower East Side of Manhattan, had to be couched in how it would benefit the surrounding low-income community. One message was never enough. When Tibor sold a “design” to a client, he did not hype a particular typeface or color, but rather how the end result would simultaneously advance both client and culture.
Tibor did not, however, rebel against being a professional — M&Co. was in business to be a successful business and he enjoyed the financial rewards. Nonetheless, he challenged the conventions of success. “Everyone can hire a good photographer, choose a tasteful typeface and produce a perfect mechanical,” Tibor once railed. “So What? That means ninety-five percent of the work exists on the same professional level, which for me is the same as being mediocre.” Hence Tibor ardently avoided any solution, or any client, that would perpetuate this bete noir. About clients Tibor said: “We’re
not here to give them what’s safe and expedient. We’re not here to help eradicate everything of visual interest from the face of the earth. We’re here to make them think about design that’s dangerous and unpredictable. We’re here to inject art into commerce.”
...Curiously, M&Co had developed a house style of its own based on vernacularism, the so-called “undesign” that Tibor celebrated for its unfettered expression, which also fed into the post-modern penchant for referencing the past. While Tibor’s ire sometimes seemed inconsistent with his own practice he rationalized M&Co’s use of vernacular as a symbol of protest — a means of undermining the cold conformity of the International corporate style.
M&Co left scores of design artifacts behind, but Tibor will be remembered more by his critiques on the nature of consumption and production than by his formal studio achievements, which were contributed to by many talented design associates. Despite numerous entries in design annuals, and the catalog of objects in his own book Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, the guts of Tibor’s accomplishment was enlarging the parameters of design from service to cultural force. And this was no more apparent than in his later work. For when Tibor realized that stylish record albums, witty advertisements, and humorous watches and clocks had a limited cultural value, he turned to editing.
...without total control he was frustrated by his inability to experiment with a new pictorial narrative theory that he was developing...
Two names changed design in the eighties and nineties: Mac and Tibor. One changed the way we work, the other the way we think. The former is our tool, the latter was our conscience.
Lest I Forget Tibor. (2011, October 11). PRINT Magazine. https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/lest-i-forget-tibor/
