In 1988, Tibor Kalman, designer Emily Oberman, and intern Scott Stowell were frequently left at New York’s Ceasar Video without adult supervision in the middle of the night. They were working at the edit facility on M&Co.’s music video for the Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers,” a typographically driven solution that would both break new ground and take an inordinate amount of time to produce.

Kalman had arranged a deal whereby M&Co. could use the facility 24 hours a day during the video’s production, giving them the run of the place after business hours—and often past 4 a.m. Hilarity of the kind that accompanies caffeine and overwork ensued. And Oberman recalls one night in particular, when Kalman removed every poster from every wall in the facility—Joseph Beuys prints, if her memory serves—and re-hung each piece upside down.

When Ceasar Video staffers arrived for work the next day, there was intrigue and confusion—and finally, the decision to embrace the upended art. “And for as long as I continued to go to that facility, it stayed up that way,” says Oberman, now partner of Number 17 in New York, whose term at M&Co. from 1987 to 1993 was the longest run of any employee in the firm’s 14-year lifespan.

M&Co.’s sprawling mythology brims with antics along these lines, many with the same Marx Brothers’ quality. But the story of Ceasar Video and the art on its walls is a particularly tidy metaphor for Kalman’s preternatural ability to wrench audiences out of what they’d come to rely on as proper and right.

JUST EXACTLY NOT QUITE RIGHT
Graphic design in the 1980s was drowning in varnish. A blind reverence for expensive production values had begun to supersede content. And from 1979 to 1993, M&Co. scoured the gloss off those surfaces. As Peter Hall and others have noted, the firm’s signature style is often purported to be a lack thereof—or at least mutable in nature, largely dependent on the designers who worked there at any given time—but the oeuvre is unified by an overarching desire to “strip away the designer’s habit to make things line up or to be satisfied if it’s just pretty,” says Alexander Isley, who worked at M&Co. from 1984 to 1986 and today runs Alexander Isley Inc.

That sensibility drove projects large and small. For the 42nd Street Development Project, Kalman’s signage guidelines promoted not uniformity but the kaleidoscopic, mismatched mayhem of the street’s past. For Restaurant Florent, M&Co.’s 1986 postcards—printed on cheap, brown cardboard stock, featuring icons Isley drew from the yellow pages—flew in the face of the glitz and glam of New York City’s culinary culture.

Even printers were entrenched. When M&Co. cooked up the idea to print Florent’s matchbooks inside out—cardboard brown on the outside, that gorgeous gloss wasting away on the interior—it was difficult to convince the printer to do so, “because that just wasn’t the way things were done,” says Isley. “It rocked their world that we were asking them to run the paper upside down. I wasn’t even convinced they were going to do it until the matchbooks showed up.”

Oberman remembers that Kalman—who famously entered the profession without a formal design education—aimed for what he called “just exactly not quite right,” and for 14 years, M&Co. designers worked in that vein under Kalman’s unrelenting style of creative direction thinking about things in the ostensibly wrong way with the intent to land on a more honest, more interesting kind of right. “I hate all those expressions like ‘Think outside the box,’” says Stowell, an intern in 1988 and M&Co. designer from 1990 to 1993, “because I think the notion of accepting the fact that there’s a box in the first place is a big problem people have in general. And what you’re talking about with M&Co. is people who didn’t recognize—or care—that that box existed.”