Michael Bierut in. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mentor, Or, Why Modernist Designers Are SuperiorBy the time I left Vignelli Associates in 1990, I felt I was ready to move far beyond the limiting strictures of modernism. The period of graphic self-indulgence that followed is now a bit painful for me to contemplate. After a time I came to appreciate the tough love that my favorite mentor had so painstakingly administered for a full decade. The turning point came in about 1996, when I received a call to design a book for Tibor Kalman. This was the monograph that would become Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist. I was surprised and pleased. As a designer at Vignelli Associates, I had followed the work of M&Co. with interest and admiration, noting how often they broke every design rule in the world with cheekiness and impunity. I arrived at my meeting with Tibor, brimming with notions about how my book design would embody the irreverence of the M&Co. worldview.
Tibor listened patiently to my ideas — there were lots of them — and then paused for a long time. “Well, yes, you could do some stuff like that,” he responded carefullly. “Or, we could do something like this. You could work out a good clear grid. We could edit all the images really carefully. Then you could do a really nice clean layout, perfect pace, perfect sequence. You know,” he added with a smile, “sort of like a Vignelli book. And then we could fuck it up a little.
