Massimo Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli was an Italian designer who worked in a number of areas including packaging, houseware, furniture, public signage, and showroom design. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella. His motto was, "If you can design one thing, you can design everything," which the broad range of his work reflects.

Vignelli worked firmly within the modernist tradition. His style stressed simplicity by using basic geometric shapes.

Vignelli studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and later at the Università Iuav di Venezia. At the age of 16, he joined the Castiglioni brothers' firm, which designed in a wide variety of areas, to work as a draftsman.: 22 From 1957 to 1960, he visited America on a fellowship, and returned to New York in 1966 to co-found the New York branch of a new company, Unimark International, which quickly became, in scope and personnel, one of the largest design firms in the world. The firm went on to design many of the world's most recognizable corporate identities, including that of American Airlines (which forced him to incorporate the eagle, Massimo was always quick to point out). Vignelli designed the iconic signage for the New York City Subway system during this period, and the 1970s-80s map of the system. Contrary to news reports, Vignelli did not design the Washington Metro Map, which was designed by Lance Wyman and Bill Cannan. Vignelli created the signage and wayfinding system for the DC Metro and suggested it be named "Metro" like many other capital city subways. Its original name was a mishmash of various states and transportation groups.

In 1971, Vignelli resigned from Unimark, in part because the design vision which he supported became diluted as the company diversified and increasingly stressed marketing, rather than design. Soon after, Massimo and Lella Vignelli founded Vignelli Associates. By 1977, Unimark filed bankruptcy.

Vignelli worked with filmmaker Gary Hustwit on the documentary Helvetica, about the typeface of the same name. Vignelli also updated his 1972 New York City Subway map for an online-only version implemented in 2011 and described it as a 'diagram', not a map, to reflect its abstract design without surface-level features such as streets and parks.

The Vignellis equipped their own home with tables, chairs, lamps and other items that they designed.

Vignelli died on May 27, 2014, in New York City.

Vignelli worked in a wide variety of areas, including interior design, environmental design, package design, graphic design, furniture design, and product design. His clients at Vignelli Associates included companies such as IBM, Knoll, Bloomingdale's and American Airlines. His former employee Michael Bierut wrote that "it seemed to me that the whole city of New York was a permanent Vignelli exhibition [around 1981]. To get to the office, I rode in a subway with Vignelli-designed signage, shared the sidewalk with people holding Vignelli-designed Bloomingdale's shopping bags, walked by St. Peter's Church with its Vignelli-designed pipe organ visible through the window. At Vignelli Associates, at 23 years old, I felt I was at the center of the universe."Vignelli participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007, as well as publishing the book, Vignelli: From A to Z, containing a series of essays describing the principles and concepts behind "all good design". It is alphabetically organized by topic, roughly approximating a similar course he taught at Harvard's School of Design and Architecture.

Vignelli's designs were famous for following a minimal aesthetic and a narrow range of typefaces that Vignelli considered to be perfect in their genre, including Akzidenz-Grotesk, Bodoni, Helvetica, Garamond No. 3 and Century Expanded. He wrote in 1991 on a poster for a typeface exhibition showcasing these "basic ones", that "In the new computer age, the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest."In January 2009, Vignelli released The Vignelli Canon as a free e-book; an expanded version was printed in September 2010. In the introduction, Vignelli writes, "I thought that it might be useful to pass some of my professional knowledge around, with the hope of improving [young designers'] design skills. Creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at its best."Vignelli worked with the National Park Service and the design staff at the Harpers Ferry Center in creation of the "Unigrid System." The system has been used since 1977 in creation of park brochures in all national parks locations.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024