INTELLECTUAL CONTORTIONISM
There was, in fact, a rightness to much of what went on at M&Co., whose ranks were filled with impeccably trained designers, many of whom had cut their teeth at corporate identity firms. Colorblind though it was, Kalman’s eye had an otherwise precision-engineered quality, including an ability, which Douglas Riccardi, principal of Memo Productions, describes as “admirably, freakishly, scarily good,” to zero in on the one concept, among hundreds of sketches, that was incontestably right. “To me,” says Oberman, “that talent was as important as having done the sketch in the first place. He could take a great idea and make it better. And often it would be better because he pushed it a little bit more in the wrong direction.”

That so many M&Co. designers were versed in the rules put the firm in a more authoritative position to break them. Amid the piles of portfolios M&Co. amassed daily—one festooned in pink faux fur, another bursting with fake album covers—there would be a lone manila folder from a Swiss-trained designer. “And that would be the person Tibor would hire,” says Riccardi, who himself had worked at corporate identity firm Anspach Grossman Portugal prior to joining M&Co. in 1986. “It allowed the design process to stay where it should,” he says, “which is at the conceptual level. If we came to grips with the concept, if we agreed on whatever it was we were trying to achieve, he would trust that we’d pick the right typefaces and colors, but we didn’t waste too much time talking about those things. So I think that part of his ‘thinking wrong’ was that he was just thinking, period.” As creative vice president of Bumble and bumble Alexander Brebner remembers, working at M&Co. required that he suspend what years of training had taught him as proper and right. During his tenure from 1986 to 1991, he spent a good deal of time wondering whether his work was “wrong enough, or wrong in the right way,” a process he describes as a kind of intellectual contortionism, both draining and liberating. “It can be exhausting to incorporate that kind of ‘thinking wrong’ into your ethos,” he says. “You have to constantly be prepared to ask if there’s another way. And of course there always is, but you have to dig and dig. You have to go through the looking glass and put yourself in a backward context in order to contort your thinking.”

A TIBOR ANGEL OR DEVIL
To this day, Kalman’s creative direction is part of Brebner’s process, an inner critic he calls “either a Tibor angel or devil” that sits on his shoulder, questioning whether his work could be better, different, whether he’s settling for just good enough. While the intensity of that voice has diminished in recent years, Brebner says that one look at Kalman’s portrait on the cover of Perverse Optimist, from which his former boss smiles up at him, is enough to activate the running commentary.

Upon Kalman’s untimely death in 1999, a reporter from TIME called Doyle to see if he might provide a few famous examples of this celebrated designer’s work, projects that the mainstream would recognize. For a moment, Doyle was tempted to fabricate a list of all the familiar work—the Exxon and IBM logos, for example, and the Heinz ketchup bottle—that Kalman never produced. Had Doyle succumbed to the temptation, the stunt might well have made the point that M&Co. operated neither for nor in the mainstream but against its grain. It also would have raised a one-fingered salute to the establishment, one last time, on Kalman’s behalf. “It would have been a fitting tribute,” says Doyle, “But ultimately, I knew TIME had a weapon against that kind of thinking: fact checkers.”