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Tibor Kalman
'After fifteen or twenty years in the profession I discovered that design is just a language and the real issue is what you see that language to do'
Tibor Kalman was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1949 and emigrated to US with his family in 1956. From 1967-70 he studied journalism at New York University, where he worked on the university newspaper and joined the radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). 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. In 1979 Kalman left to found his own design firm, M&Co. Initially, the company 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 (with his wife Maria Kalman) and architecture. Clients included Formica, Subaru, The Limited, Chait/Day, Williwear, MTV, Restaurant Florent, David Byrne and Talking Heads, and MoMA. Work is now archived a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 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. [Kalman died in 1999, see Tibor Kalman obituary, Eye no. 32]
Moira Cullen: You're back.
Tibor Kalman: Everyone else invests more in this idea that I do. I never felt I'd left, so I don't feel I've come back.
MC: We spoke just weeks before your departure for Rome, in the summer of 1993, when the economy was soft, nerves were raw, diatribes about legibility and relevance were being hurled across design's generational divide, and the prospect of a 'changing of the guard' prevailed. You were deeply dissatisfied with design.
TK: I thought the argument about legibility was in fact about typefaces, and arguments about typefaces are boring and narrow in the light of what's really going on in the world and the true purpose and potential of communication. That isn't the real issue.
MC: What is the real issue?
TK: Whether we can do something with design that makes a difference in the world. Whether designers can use their skills to create change - cultural, political and economic. Economic change is the one designers have been good at because they can make sales go up, stocks go up, sell more spaghetti sauce.
MC: But what about the other changes?
TK: They are not where the money is and are not what design has usually been called upon to do. I grew up doing very commercial work - brochures, logos, packaging and record covers. My journey has been a move from using graphics to make money to using graphic design to create new aesthetic ideas - which is where most designers start - to becoming frustrated and moving on to industrial design, film, television and architecture. After 15 or 20 years I discovered that design is just language and the real issue is what you use that language to do. Now I'm at a point where I'm tired of talking about what kind of accents to use. I want to talk about the words that are being said.
MC: To whom? Is the audience as important as the message?
TK: What is said determines who listens and who understands. Graphic design is a language, but graphic designers are so busy worrying about the nuances - accents, punctuation and so on - that they spend little time thinking about what the words add up to. I'm interested in using our communication skills to change the way things are . . .
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