Tibor Kalman

Tibor is an interesting persona and a very creative graphic designer. He has quite a large variety of produced work:  from flat images to three dimensional figures, all very bright and striking with brilliant ideas. Some of Tibor’s work is political and brave which probably came from his desire to study journalism in university. He purposely made his work explicit so it would catch people’s attention and attract the audiences.

Tibor Kalman has worked in ‘Colors’ magazine which is a magazine for ‘United colours of Benetton’ and here are some images from the magazine which are Tibor’s work. 

First of all this image made me think ‘racist!’ as soon as I saw it, but then I took a closer look and I realised that there is nothing abusing about it, it was the other way around. Three hearts with colour name tags relate to skin colours of a Chinese black and white people. It shows that under the skin we are pretty much the same. Considering how usually Benetton makes posters, it’s always people of all the races together. 

 

But here we have another of Tibor’s pieces and this time it is giving wrong ideas to audience. From the first glance the patient in bed has noticeable similarity to Jesus. The second thing is quite strange as the surrounding people look a lot healthier than the one in bed and this gives a contrast to an image and maybe a hint to obesity (but this is only my first thoughts on the image), as it turned out, the people in the picture are all family and the person in bed is suffering from AIDS and the photograph was used as a poster for the AIDS awareness and later won awards.