CONSTANT EVOLUTION
When he joined M&Co. in 1983, Stephen Doyle, creative director of Doyle Partners, recalls walking into Kalman’s 57th Street office to see a gash in the wall behind the receptionist’s area, created with what he suspects were blunt axes. “It looked like a cartoon,” he says, “where Superman had just flown through the wall. So the minute you walked in the office, you saw this architectural wrongness to begin with.”

Two weeks after his arrival, Kalman fired every designer on staff but Doyle. There was, as Doyle says, “a lot of grid action happening at M&Co. at the time, and Tibor—untrained as a designer—wasn’t interested in the grid. He wasn’t interested in formalism.” Nor was Doyle. His arrival—followed by new hires Tom Kluepfel and Isley, Doyle’s former Cooper Union student—is associated with the first of many shifts in M&Co.’s evolution, this one a swing into its conceptual positioning.

Few discussions of M&Co.’s legacy fail to include accounts of Kalman’s raucous, confrontational, and sometimes self-contradictory attacks on contemporary design practice in the late 1980s, when he encouraged designers to be bad and to subvert what they’d come to accept as the design process. It’s difficult at first to reconcile that persona with Isley’s memory of his boss at early AIGA events around 1984, which has Kalman standing self-consciously in the corner, put off by the clubby atmosphere he never felt a part of. It’s a stark contradiction, but the connection between those two snapshots of Kalman—blending into the walls of AIGA or busting through them—is his outsider status, fiercely maintained and in many ways the foundation on which his celebrity is built.

Doyle, too, situated himself in the fringes of the rarified world of graphic design. “I never felt like I was a part of the design canon,” says Doyle, who had worked at Rolling Stone and Esquire magazines prior to joining M&Co., “so I was ready to try anything. And it didn’t matter to me a whole heck of a lot if I failed at something, because I never thought I was going to go all that far anyway. I used to play at work, and the designers with a capital D at the time worked at work. That’s not to say I didn’t take it seriously, but I took it seriously as play.”

Among other things, Doyle brought a classical sense of typography to M&Co., which he employed in the creation of sophisticated visual incongruities. On the cover of the Talking Heads album Little Creatures, his use of Torino against the painting by folk artist Howard Finster seemed antithetical to instinct. His cacophonous album-cover design for a Thelonious Monk compilation—one of the most layered mechanicals he ever did, Doyle says—had nothing to do with professional, “capital D” design. “I was delighted to make things wrong by heading in the opposite direction of what was going on around me,” he says. “It was the ’80s and it was nasty. People were doing very collage-y stuff and lots of stair-steppy things. Everything had a grid—and by grid I mean a graph-paper kind of grid. Makes me crazy, that stuff.”

To Doyle and Isley, M&Co. felt so removed from commercial practices—so “outsider art,” as Doyle puts it—that neither appreciated the impact their work was about to have. “We were totally flying by the seat of our pants,” says Doyle, “making things up as we went along.” It wasn’t until 1986, when Kalman organized the Fresh Dialogue conference at AIGA, that Isley realized M&Co.’s reputation as the anti-design firm—and Kalman the anti-designer—had captured the imagination of the design community it had very little to do with until then. The invitation, printed on cheesy paper with bad letterspacing, promised “Design Without Designers: or How I Learned to Stop Letterspacing and Love the Non.” To a sold-out audience in FIT’s Katie Murphy Amphitheater, 24-yearold Isley presented a slide show of disassembled cardboard boxes in a discussion of “unseen design,” created without regard for aesthetics or audience. Other presentations similarly extracted examples of vernacular design—including the auto magazine Hemmings Motor News, as crude in design as it is beloved by car enthusiasts—from their intended contexts to examine and appreciate them in a formal sense. “It was one of those few times in your life when you feel you’re doing the right thing,” Isley says. “We were behind this guy who maybe wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing himself, but he was pushing against stuff. And those of us who were there wanted to see if you could love and hate graphic design at the same time. Can you know there’s something better out there even if you’re not sure what it is?”

TYPOGRAPHERS USING TYPE
Kalman frequently said he didn’t like to work on the same kind of project more than twice. “The first one,” he told Kurt Andersen in an interview in his monograph Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, “you fuck it up in an interesting way; the second one, you get it right; and then you’re out of there.” As Kalman continued to insert himself in areas in which he lacked expertise—culminating in his role as editor in chief of Benetton’s Colors, where he found full expression and corporate sponsorship for his vision of design as a means to provide relevant content to a world suffering from its dearth—the improvisational quality that Isley and Doyle brought to bear continued to shape M&Co.’s output.

In a real sense, “(Nothing But) Flowers” was informed by a lack of insider information. While Oberman had studied filmmaking at Cooper Union, neither she nor Kalman had produced a music video before. “In hindsight,” says Oberman, “I look at that video and think, ‘Wow, we really didn’t know what we were doing.’” The video—in which the lyrics move across the screen as the band performs in a stark set—pushes typography into the role of a dynamic, narrative device. When David Byrne sings that years ago he pretended he was a billboard against the side of the road, for example, the type—projected directly onto Byrne’s face—dramatizes the lyric, essentially turning him into the billboard he says he pretended to be.

From a production standpoint, the technology that facilitated those now-basic special effects was in its infancy, rendering the concept inconvenient to produce, at best. It’s also likely that those inside the music video industry would have rejected the typographical approach as too quaint, or “bouncing ball-y,” Oberman says. “It wasn’t someone in spandex busting a move. But because we were designers and typographers, it seemed like an interesting way to tell the story.”

To hear M&Co. designers’ recollections, there’s often the distinct sense that the ground they broke was more stumbled on than sought out. Stowell, who would later serve as art director of Colors magazine in Italy from 1993 to 1994, recalls that his former boss once said, “Everything I do is motivated by this.” Kalman then thrust his middle finger in the air in defiance of any mite of establishment thinking that might have been floating therein. Certainly, that general outlook infused the atmosphere with a spirit of purposeful insubordination. And certainly, very little of what Kalman did to upset the established order—including his inclination to work in categories whose conventions he didn’t know from the inside—was accidental.

The perception among those on the outside was that M&Co. designers were on a crusade to shock the world with their messianic, anticorporate message. In reality, they were often just doing what they did. They were typographers, in other words, using typography in a music video. Because Kalman cultivated an upside-down way of looking at things—and because M&Co. designers often shared the inclination to do so—“what they did” invariably countered prevailing standards. “There wasn’t the sense that this is the way things are done, so let’s do them differently,” says Stowell, who today runs his design studio Open in New York. “It wasn’t as though we’d get a job and figure out a way to give everyone the finger. We were just doing good work, or trying to do good work, and Tibor was doing the same thing.”