Tibor Kalman

Colors Magazine Kalmans Front Cover Edition

Tibor Kalman, died on May 2, 1999, after battling non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was one of the few graphic designers whose accomplishments are acknowledge still today both within the design field and out.Kalman was a graphic designer who was able to communicate his designs in any shape or form possible enabling to increase public awareness of variety of social issues. He then went on creating his own design company M&Co taking from the name after his wife and business partner, Maria. With his business being fully conventional in the year of 1979, Kalman designs were being distributed to banks and department stores resulting his business transformed into a soapbox in the 1980s for his social mission. Even though business was booming for Kalman he always seemed to remain humble and sincere. One Christmas kalman sent over 300 clients and colleagues a small cardboard box filled with the typical Spartan contents of a homeless-shelter meal, i.e. crackers, sandwich crisp etc. and offered to match any donations that the recipients made to an agency for the homeless. The following year he sent a book peppered with facts about poverty along with twenty dollars and a stamped envelope addressed to another charity. Excessive actions like these made both the public and his employees question Kalman’ssanity as his prickly personality sometimes resulted in random acts such as these.In 1991, Kalman closed M&Co's New York offices and accepted an offer to work for Mario Toscani, the creative director of Benetton. The company had already created controversy with its iconoclastic, multicultural ad campaign, which featured, among other images, pictures of a nun and priest kissing, a black woman nursing a white baby and pictures of an AIDS patient on his deathbed, surrounded by his family. Toscani wanted Kalman to create a magazine that embodied the company's radical chic ethos. Kalman assembled a team of designers and editors and moved, with his wife and two children, to Rome.With Colors, Kalman found the perfect platform for his ideas -- both visual and philosophical. With its striking, graphics-heavy layout and its bilingual articles on themes like race and AIDS, Colors was a unique company periodical. The magazine he created existed to promote a multinational corporation's brand identity and an expansive, multi-ethnic philosophy. It pushed boundaries in terms of its editorial emphasis on politics, and it pushed design to the point of post-literacy by making words secondary to images. One of Colors' most famous layouts was the "What if?" spread from the magazine's race issue: Using computer graphics programs, Colors changed the races of several iconic men and women. Queen Elizabeth was made to look black and Spike Lee white. The issue propelled Colors to international fame, and landed Kalman a spot on NBC's "Today," but the catalysts for Kalman's departure from the magazine were already in place. Whilst researching Tibor Kalman I gained interest as I found many aspects of him that were similar to my own personality. He was a perfectionist in his early days and knew exactly how he wanted things to be, he would go at any lengths to do so even if that meant pissing his own employees off. His unique eye to design as well as his random acts is what made an impact on the design industry. Like Tyler, the creator and other people I wrote about on my previous posts Kalman had a disobedient way of thinking, never caring what the outcome of his reputation would be. Yet he still went along with it becoming a well-known icon with the graphic industry.

Reference.

• http://www.designishistory.com/1980/tibor-kalman/
• (http://www.salon.com/people/obit/1999/05/19/kalman)
• (http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-tiborkalman)