Massimo Vignelli Article + Cover

GRAPHIC DESIGN
Vol 96
Pills
May 2019
Future Design:
Where is it going?
Toward a more
mindful design
SPECIAL
Paula Scher
Typography
LEARN FROM THE BEST
Massimo Vignelli,
The Total Designer

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Massimo Vignelli:
The Total Designer
Massimo Vignelli and his New York Subway Diagram, first design 1972, MOMA, New York
Writer Guya Maggi
Pictures Pinterest
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If you decide to watch one of the many of Massimo Vignelli’s
interviews on Youtube, you cannot remain impassive: the
simple and humble way he speaks, with lots of clever irony,
accompanied by a welcoming tone of voice just make him
memorable. As well as his design still is. Let’s see why he was
such a great designer, but first, let me introduce him.
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"If you can design one thing,
you can design anything".
Massimo Vignelli
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Massimo was born in Milan, Italy, in 1931 and
studied architecture between Milan and Venice.
In 1966, he moved to New York with his
wife Lella, where they started the branch of
their agency Unimark, what became one of
the biggest design agencies in the world few
years later. The agency graphic style was
pure modernist and it privileged standardisation
and system, through the use of grids
and basic geometry shapes as the main tools
to create corporate communication. The Vignelli’s
couple work in the design world has
given such a great contribution, that they received
many awards and appeared in many
Halls of Fame (among them also the New
York Art Directors Club) and in 1983 they received
the AIGA Gold Medal. As stated on
the AIGA website, it is interesting to see how
Massimo and Lella worked together in two
ways: he concentrated on the “2D” while she
handled the “3D”. But it is Massimo who was
the visionary.
“I talk of feelings, possibilities,
what a design could be.”
While his wife, the realist: “I think of feasibility,
planning, what a design can be.” Massimo
Vignelli was defined a total designer: he
worked in interior and architectural design,
product, furniture, package, graphic, book,
typography, industrial and even environmental
design. Impressive, isn’t it? This is the
reason why his career path can be summarised
in one of his most popular quotes: “If
you can design one thing, you can design
everything”. One of his most appreciated
works, in fact, is the New York Subway Diagram,
designed for the first time in 1972.
In order to deliver a useful and appropriate
design, he should have had to understand
what billions of people were looking. One of
his most appreciated works is the New York
Subway Diagram, designed in 1972. In order
to deliver a useful and appropriate design,
he should have had to understand what billions
of people were looking for, where they
would have looked for it and ultimately, providing
it in the least confusing way possible.
Something very much related to user experience
today, don’t you think? He had a
very precise diagram approach based on the
use of grids of 45 and 90 degrees, the same
used in the London map, designed in 1931.
One color represented one line and one dot
one station. No dot, not station. Very simple.
But as every simple and essential design, it
is a matter of shifting and trashing until you
get to the essence of it, he believed.In 1979,
the nomenclature changed so, Unimark redesigned
the new map. They maintained the
same simple grid based design, because
Massimo thougth it was essential to make
things simpler. He used to say that the problem
is too much information around, too
much visual pollution.
"Like 5£ in 1£ bag: no wonder
it breaks".

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Helvetica
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" A designer's life mission is
fighiting ugliness".
Massimo Vignelli
Design, with capital “D”, is the cure. He believed
that the “why”, the “how,” the process
of design itself, must be “equally evident and
quite beyond the tyranny of individual taste.”
Time changes, trends come and go and so
do the concepts of beauty and ugliness. It is
harder nowadays for young designers to detach
from these concepts, very much bond
to fashion, but if we listen carefully to Massimo,
we have a lot to learn from him, despite
he defined himself as “medieval”: the
investigative process in designing anything
starts searching for structure: its reward is
discipline. Specificity is the second aspect
to look for; this yields to appropriateness.
Finally, designers should search for fun, so
that they can create ambiguity. At this point,
it is important to specify, in fact, that ambiguity
in Italian does not have a negative connotation:
it means plurality of meanings and it
is a way of living. But what does that mean in
design? How to implement it? According to
Massimo, it brings another level or richness,
some things can be more than one thing,
it makes them more interesting. But it can
be dangerous, therefore, not for everybody.
Massimo and Lella looked for beauty in the
correctness of a design: the correct shape
is the shape of the object’s meaning, therefore,
we design things that are right for that
destination and not another one. Design is
an integral part of function. “Everything has
its own order,” they’ve said. “You can’t take a
piece of music and scramble the notes. You
can’t take a piece of writing and scramble the
words. You can’t take a space and scramble
the chairs around.“ An example? His perpetual
calendar is still sold (on Amazon!) and
used worldwide. It is still the only calendar
present in the MOMA’s design collection.
These thoughts are especially noticeable in
what Massimo thought about typography:
“I do not think that type should be expressive
at all. I can write the word “dog” with
any typeface and it doesn’t have to look like
a dog. But there are people that think that
when I write “dog” it should bark”. It is not
that he did not trust new typefaces, but he
truly believed that there was no need to have
so many mediocre ones, when you can use
three very good typefaces. His love for Helvetica
was limitless: he defined it modern,
loud, clear, good for everything, satisfying
our desire of legibility. To tell the truth, type is
not black and white like many designers believe,
it is very white actually: it is the space
between the letters, like music is not the
notes but the space between them. Therefore
a good designer is really sensitive to
those spaces, because in the end “almost all
the great American graphic designers have
used white space as the significant silence
to better hear their message loud and clear.”
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" If you do it right, it will last
forever: style, timelessness
and ethics"
“You can reach timelessness
if you look for the essence of
things and not at their the appearance.
The appearance
is transitory, it is fashion, it is
trendiness. But the essence
is timeless”.
This quote by Massimo Vignelli explains
very well his design choices, which are well
known to be minimalistic. He believed that
the computer advent and the increased purchasing
power made available and affordable
a wider range of items to a wider public.
Therefore, young designers started focusing
mainly on the appearance of things, in order
to keep satisfied manufacturer’s requests,
purely based on making sales. As Vignelli
himself stated, trends and styles can be
exciting and fascinating, but they have no
tomorrow. It is not just a matter of being a
good designer anymore, but also ethical: if
you give more importance to the appearance,
it means not being honest with clients
and users because what you create is not
forever. Designing something that lasts in
time makes it powerful: in a hundred years, it
can still be looked with respect, not laughed
at. The American Airlines logo designed by
Vignelli is the best example: it was created in
1967 and used until 2013. This is the longest
period a company did not need to go through
a rebranding process. But why is it really
good and timeless? Because it has no tricks,
it is simple and legible. “What is there more
American than blue and red?”, he said. He
did not look at the “wants” of the company,
but at the “needs”. At her essence. "Unfortunately
there are designers and marketing
people who intentionally look down on the
consumer with the notion that vulgarity has
a definite appeal to masses, therefore they
supply the market with a continuous flow of
vulgar and crude design. I consider this action
criminal since it is producing visual pollution
that is degrading the environment just
like all other types of pollutions. Now I guess
that, like me, you are all wondering: “Ok
great, but what is the reward in the end?”. If
Massimo would still be among us, he would
certainly reply: “Why? The reward is to do all
this!”. And it is a pretty good one.
American Airlines Logo, Massimo Vignelli 1967
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