Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist

From Barnes & Noble

How does one categorize a career that turned the world of graphic design upside down? If you're Tibor Kalman, you call it a good beginning. The renegade designer has changed the way we look at everything from magazines to music videos to restaurant menus. This overview of Kalman's career, Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, manages to capture his brilliance, offering page after page of his landmark designs, commentary from and interviews with the man himself, and contributions from his collaborators, including David Byrne, Isaac Mizrahi, Jenny Holzer, and many more.

Belinda Luscombe

. . . The only downside to this provocative catalog is that little in it is new, and Kalman's work relies on surprise.
-- Time Magazine

Brad Wieners

If, as Mickey Knox once quipped, media is like the weather, then Tibor Kalman is a man for all seasons. Kalman has excelled as a magazine editor (Colors), an art director (Artforum), a creative director (Interview), and an industrial and graphic design entrepreneur (M&Co) whose clients include Chiat/Day, Jenny Holzer, MTV, MoMA, the Talking Heads, and New York1s 42nd Street Development Project.
-- Wired

Glen Helfand

The concept of visual culture is freely tossed around in design circles, but few explore its possibilities like Tibor Kalman....[He] has made a very visible mark with a striking range of achievements: art director, creative director, video director, exhibition designer, type designer, editor-in-chief; and affiliations: Artforum, Interview, Whitney Museum of American Art, MTV, Benetton's Colors.
-- San Francisco Examiner Magazine

Library Journal

From his introductory notes explaining the book's subtitle, Kalman demonstrates a clear contrariness to the common understanding of the role of graphic design. From window dresser and shopping bag designer of the nascent Barnes & Noble in the 1970s to founder and leader of the award-winning M & Co. design firm in the 1980s to his revolutionary anti-selling aesthetic as founding editor-in-chief at Benetton's Colors magazine, Kalman has sought out roles unfamiliar to him and done them in his own way. This hasn't stopped him from developing one of the best-known and most influential bodies of work in the field. If all this monograph did were to convey this complex personality--as it does in the more than a dozen essays by and interviews with former clients and co-workers--it would be a grand success. But, more than that, it surveys important work from his entire career in more than 600 illustrations, all thoughtfully captioned. Essential for all academic libraries, this addictively browseable tribute is also recommended for larger public libraries.--Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"

I.D. Magazine

Perverse Optimist traces the career of the late design great through the worlds of others—colleagues, clients, friends, foes—from his beginnings (student activist and part-time window dresser at the NYU book store that later became Barnes & Noble) through his successes with M&Co, Colors and other projects. "Because of the chronology, you can witness the evolution of an ideology," said deWilde of the unique tome. "You go back and forth between what the philosophy of the designer is an the work itself."