Tibor Kalman booklet

TIBOR

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M&Co early work

“99% of design is about selling stuff,

and I believe in order to sell stuff you can’t really tell the truth.”

- Tibor Kalman

M&Co early work

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“People never talk about things

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priest and nun exposed

Tibor Kalman was an American graphic designer.

Originally from Budapest, Hungary, him and his family decided to flee to the United States. He came across design through Barnes & Noble by accident and set out through the 1970’s in making sale posters and displays. He didn’t really see this as “graphic design” or even as an established profession.

Him and his wife Maira opened a design firm called M&Co in 1979. The M standing for his wife Maira, which brought forth some confusion for his clienteles but Kalman enjoyed the mystery behind it. The work flowed in and soon enough M&Co was attracting more and more interesting assignments. His influence was huge through his humor and persistent approach to the appearance of film titles, books, videos, magazines, brochures, ect.

unless you shock them a bit.”

Knows for his clear ideas and concepts and not necessarily knows for a particular style of graphics. He is more concerned with the idea and content and the content that an image brings rather than the image itself. Shocking and provocative images is a way he likes to get his viewers to respond.

- Tibor Kalman

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Colors magazine covers

Queen Elizabeth

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Pope John Paul II

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Being editor of Colors, he was sick of designwing for someone else’s product and wanted to communicate through his work and change the way things were. Personally, Kalman’s achievements with Colors were a successful triumph but it also had shocking and criticized imagery as an ad campaign for Benetton. Colors ideally wanted to show the diversity of people but also show the similarity of different cultures.

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- Tibor Kalman

The magazine was in sale all over the world, 101 countires. The race issue really caught peoples attention. Tibor changing the race of well known famous people in our life.

Making Arnold Schwarzenegger and Queen Elizaebth African America and Pope John Paul II asian resulted in various Catholics and people in Great Britain very upset. Tibor enjoys these kinds of responses.

“I can design and manipulate and send people politically in the direction that I want, that’s what I like about design.”

Tibor Kalman is well known for his work as editor-in-chief of Colors magazine. When involved with Colors and his other projects, he sought to promote a political outline in a “one-world” belief in racial equality and the humanity and originality of people. Topics such as racism, sexism, culture, AIDs and religion. Tibor was very much interested in the content of photographs as a means of communication.

AIDS awareness

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In our world today, we are committed to the notion that language it self is the defining characteristic of intelligent life.

Tibor wanted to try using photographs as language, therefore the reader must attempt to “read” the images. Suggesting that photographs can convey just as much information that text does.

Colors 13 was one of Kalman’s most interesting magazines due to the way in wich he wanted to test his viewers. This issue was the wordless issue. Forcing his audience to stop and actually take in all of the images and put them together.

“It’s not that we’re against words.

We just think people expect too much from them. They expect words to tell them what’s going on in a photo, when all that words really do is impose an interpretation... Words literally tell us what to see...The only way for you to understand is by looking. You interpret visual signsgestures-that is guided by text, you might ever notice.”

- Tibor Kalman

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Tibor Tibor Tibor Tibor Tibor Tibor Tibor

Kalman, Kalman, Kalman, Kalman, Kalman, Kalman, Kalman,

Tibor, (USA: Princeton Architectual Press, 2000), 55.

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Designed and written by Caley McGuane Composed in Lucida Grande, typeface Copyright Š 2012 Caley McGuane, Portland, Maine, Maine College of Art