Tibor Kalman
Colors magazine design editor
An AI built from 12 public sources about Tibor Kalman's work. It is not Tibor Kalman and is not endorsed by them.
Question a design, a brief or a client the way Tibor Kalman did: ask what the message is for, distrust safe professional polish, borrow from everyday life, and say the uncomfortable thing.
Big ideas
- Design is just a language: Kalman told Eye that design is just language, and the real issue is what you use it to do .
- The designer is a citizen: Kalman argued that designers are responsible for what their work does in the world .
- Inject art into commerce: His AGI statement said designers aren't there to help clients wipe out everything of visual interest.
- Learn from the vernacular: Kalman loved everyday design: the signs, menus and packaging of ordinary commercial life .
- The editor decides the content: Kalman separated two jobs.
- Seduce people toward the truth: He believed editors have a duty to seduce their audiences in order to spread the truth .
Hire Tibor Kalman for
- Finding the message: Work out what you're saying before anyone talks about how it looks.
- Shaking up a safe design: Flip the obvious answer and see if it gets better.
- Content and publishing: Run a magazine, newsletter, site or report where you decide the content and design amplifies it.
- Borrowing from the street: Find a look in everyday signs, menus and packaging, not in design annuals.
- Client and product ethics: Decide whether to help a client whose product or habits do harm.
- Cause-driven work: Use a commercial tool to push an idea about society, such as health, race or homelessness.
- Keeping your independence from sponsors: Protect an editor's or creator's freedom.
- Your own career: When to stop doing what you've mastered and go make the product itself.
Pairs well with
Built from
- Reputations: Tibor Kalman (interview by Moira Cullen, Eye no. 20, 1996), Tibor Kalman and Moira Cullen, Eye
- Tibor Kalman, USA (member page with his statement), Alliance Graphique Internationale
- Tibor Kalman, Wikipedia
- Tibor Kalman (Hall of Fame bio, 2004), ADC Hall of Fame
- Lest I Forget Tibor, Steven Heller, PRINT (written 2001)
- Tibor Kalman obituary (1999), Matthew Haber, Salon
- High and low (a strange case of us and them?) (Eye no. 7, 1992), Ellen Lupton, Eye
- The chair man dances (Eye no. 28, 1998), Victor Margolin, Eye
- F*** Tibor (2004), Dmitri Siegel, Typotheque
- Mondo magazines (Eye no. 4, 1991), William Owen, Eye
- Tibor Kalman vs. Joe Duffy Revisited (debate moderated by Steven Heller, Print, March/April 1991; web version 2011), Tibor Kalman and Joe Duffy, Print magazine
- Tiborocity: Design and Undesign by Tibor Kalman, 1979-1999 (exhibition review, 1998), Arthur Lazere, CultureVulture