Type Tuesday — Tibor Kalman

Okay, today is another Type Tuesday, and I thought I'd post about one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century. That designer is Tibor Kalman. Kalman, who would have been 64 years old on July 6th, died in 1999 of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. In 1993 he was voted as one of the 15 Masters of Design by readers of How magazine, and in 1999 was awarded the American Institute of Graphic Artist (AIGA) MEDAL. This is a designer who had an influence on me in high school before I even knew who he was. You see Tibor Kalman, directed, designed, and produced the video "(Nothing But) Flowers" for the Talking Heads, which was one of my favorite bands. He also designed a few of their covers. But embarrassingly, I rarely read liner notes back in those days.

He was the founder of the revolutionary New York design firm, M&Co. His innovative ideas about art and society challenged the way designers and their clients saw the world. Kalman saw himself as a social activist, and believed graphic design was a way of achieving two things: good design and social responsibility. Graphic design being mass communication, he believed it should be used to increase public awareness on social issues. By the late 1980's he became known as “bad boy” of graphic design. In 1986 when the clothing company Esprit, which had boasted of being liberal and environmentally friendly, was awarded the AlGA Design Leadership award, Tibor became irate and anonymously distributed leaflets during the awards ceremony at the AlGA National Design Conference in San Francisco protesting the company's exploitation of Asian laborers. Kalman believed that designers should take a greater responsibility for how their work influenced the surrounding culture. Below are some example of his work. Enjoy.



In the video "(Nothing But) Flowers" for the Talking Heads, we see a good example of how Kalman interwove social commentary into his design work. (And this was in 1988)

"What we really tried to do was integrate the words and images very thoroughly, because we're very interested in this notion of how you combine words and images more powerfully than just, Here's the picture and here's the type"

— Tibor Kalman on the video "(Nothing But) Flowers" for the Talking Heads in HOW magazine, 1993.





















The "Siver Askew Watch" is a good example of Kalman's dry sense of humor.

"We felt that if people would buy watches that didn't even have numbers on them, and be able to tell what time it was, they could tell time with a watch that had all the numbers mixed up. It's nicknamed "Stupid" because the idea comes from grandfather clock in one of James Marshall's brilliant children's books about the Stupid family."

— Tibor Kalman on M&Co's "Siver Askew Watch" in HOW magazine, 1993






















































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