The Enduring Design Legacy of Massimo Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli, the acclaimed Italian graphic designer who gave shape to spare, Modernist vision, died last month at the age of 83. His passing sparked immense sadness and an outpouring of admiration and love for the life he lived by designers and firms all across the globe.

“Massimo, probably more than anyone else, gets the credit for introducing a European Modernist point of view to American graphic design,” said Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram, a leading graphic design firm. Working firmly within that modernist tradition, he preached clarity and coherence and practiced them with intense discipline in everything he turned out, whether kitchenware, public signage, books or home interiors. Vignelli aimed for design that was “visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all timeless,” a slogan of sorts for his New York design studio, Vignelli Associates, which he founded in 1971 with his wife, Lella.

His clients included American Airlines, Ford, IBM, Xerox and Gillette. St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan had him design their entire church. His brochures for the National Park Service are still used. Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys all gave out Vignelli-designed shopping bags in the 1970s. He even designed the signs for the New York and Washington subways and suggested the name Metro for the Washington system.

Tom Geismar, a leading graphic designer with the firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, said in an interview, “What always amazes me about Massimo is his ability to take lots of information and somehow clarify it.” Several years after working with American Airlines, Vignelli came to design one of the best-known and most controversial maps ever used by the New York City subway. Unveiled in 1972, the map turned New York City into a series of rigid brown and beige slabs with colorful subway lines darting across it. The map was hardly a map though, at least not one like riders expected. Its lines and shapes weren’t accurate recreations of the city or the subway routes. Instead, they were representations meant to make the routes and their stops easier to understand. Design aficionados considered the map — Mr. Vignelli preferred to call it a diagram — an ingenious work of streamlined beauty. It earned a place in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection of postwar design.

Massimo’s legacy as one of the most influential 20^th century designers will forever endure the test of time, and so will his iconic quote from his appearance in the film Helvetica: “The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design.” Hear more from this design icon in the video below.