A benchmark magazine about Communication that pushed design and photography to its limits – ‘the first magazine for the Global Village’, said Kalman, and the shared international language would be visual.

He was interested in ‘communication’, and what it could do. The text in Colors magazine was always in two languages for learning purposes and had 9 different language versions.

"Ugliness is more interesting than beauty…that stuff which is human, interesting, fucked up, passionate rather than logical, reasonable and, of course, beautiful.”

Tibor saw himself as a social activist for whom graphic design was a means of achieving two ends: good design and social responsibility. Good design, which he defined as “unexpected and untried,” added more interest, and was thus a benefit, to everyday life. And, since graphic design is mass communication, Tibor believed it should be used to increase public awareness of a variety of social issues. Being a master of good design meant nothing unless it supported a message that led to action. Everything had to have meaning and resonance.

Tibor Kalman

Kalman and company’s work, at its strongest, represented another kind of postmodernism — witty, ironic, referential, but never sentimental

His keynote address to the 1989 AIGA National Design Conference, in which he admonished designers to be bad in order to do good.

https://www.typotheque.com/articles/tibor_kalman_perverse_optimist

https://www.aiga.org/medalist-tiborkalman

https://www.imagesource.com/making-you-look-colors-magazine-issue13-part-one/