Massimo Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli was an Italian designer who lived from 1931-2014. He was not only a graphic designer, but also a typographer and an industrial designer. He designed everything from typefaces to logos to posters and signage to furniture and tableware.
As a young man of 16, Vignelli worked with many of the famous architects of the time, some of them being the Castiglione brothers, Giulio Minoletti and Franco Albini. He worked in the architecture field until he was 22, and then began a career as a freelance graphic designer.  He studied architecture at Politecnico di Milano and later at the Università di Architettura in Venice.
Vignelli first came to the United states on a series of fellowships in 1957, and over the course of three years spent time in Boston and Chicago.  Upon his return to Milan in 1960, he formed his own design office.  In 1965, Vignelli helped to form Unimark International, at the time one of the largest graphic design forms in the world.  While there, Vignelli worked on projects for some high-profile clients, including Ford, JCPenny, Memorex, Panasonic and Xerox.  The National Parks Service was also a major client for Vignelli at the time.  He formally resigned from his position as the head of the Unimark New York office in 1971, and that same year opened his own design firm, Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella.
1972 was a big year for Vignelli.  Not only was he commissioned with designing the Bloomingdales logo, which is still in use today, but in August his New York City Subway maps were able to be seen around New York.  Previously, there was a real issue relating to the navigation of the subway system.  Much of the signage still in use was from when transportation around New York City was run by three separate agencies.  The biggest problems arose during the 1964 worlds fair, where people from outside of the area were taxed with trying to navigate the five boroughs, a task which was quickly deemed extremely difficult, even for native New Yorkers.
The project had started while Vignelli was at Unimark, but the map had become obsolete by 1979 due to changes within the structure of the subway system and it’s coloration standards.  The same basic map is still in use today, though it is a revised, digital design completed in 2008.  In 2011 the MTA again invited Vignelli to design a system in which the map could be periodically updated in relation to engineering work taking place on specific lines, a system which is still in use today.
Vignelli, in his design, relied on a few basic principles. His work was very geometric in concept, and he relied heavily on the use of white and negative space.  He stuck to only a few specific typefaces, Helvetica bing his favorite, followed closely by Bodoni.  he actually developed his own version of the classic font, called “Our Bodoni,” which he believed worked better with Helvetica.  The other few typefaces Vignelli used included Futura, Century Expanded, Garamond and Times.Vignelli also believed in the use of a grid, an idea he pushed during his time at Unimark.  He believed it was able to standardize design and turn it into a sort of a system.  So long as the system was followed, creating good design was almost fool proof.  The Unimark grid was so named the “Unigrid.”
But Vignelli believed in more than the tangible, physical results of the design.  He was interested in the conceptual, intangible ideas that a piece not only evoked, but the understanding and the process that the designer used to produce the piece.  He believed that it was of the utmost importance that a designer truly understand the topic he is designing around or for, and the only way to come to such an understanding was through research.  The semantics, syntactics and pragmatics were just a few of the intangible facets he was concerned with when it came to a design.  He would eventually collect all of his thoughts on design in a book, appropriately named the Vignelli Canon.

Visit the Vignelli Associates website here.