Tibor Kalman Research Paper

Tibor Kalman was born in Budapest, Hungary on July 6, 1949. He and his family moved to New York, and in 1956 Kalman became a US citizen. Kalman combined his desire to break new ground visually with a passionate commitment to social causes. From his days as an undergraduate at New York University, where he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society (he left school to support the Communists in Cuba for a period), Kalman’s radical politics and his radical designs were inextricably linked. “I use contrary-ism in every part of my life. In design … I’m always trying to turn things upside down and see if they look any better,” he told Charlie Rose in a December 1998 interview. After dropping out, he worked as a supervisor of the in-house design …show more content…
One design would have to advance both client and culture. Tibor said: “We're not here to give them what's safe and expedient. We're not here to help eradicate everything of visual interest from the face of the earth. We're here to make them think about design that's dangerous and unpredictable. We're here to inject art into commerce.” He enlarged the parameters of design from service to cultural force. Steven Heller wrote “Of the two names that changed design in the '80s and '90s—Mac and Tibor—one changed the way we work, the other the way we think. The former is a tool, the latter was our conscience”. Kalman's restless, eclectic mind was always open to inspiration from the most unlikely sources, although he had a particular fondness for vernacular design, the art and culture of Africa and India, and the thoughts of his children, Lulu and Alexander. He urged his collaborators to reject their preconceptions and seek the most direct and surprising way to communicate an idea, constantly exhorting me to forget the accepted rules of design and journalism, and not to be afraid to make things rough, ugly, or simply wrong, in order to gain the attention of the