Massimo Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli (January 10, 1931 – May 27, 2014) was an Italian designer who worked (together with his wife, the architect and designer Lella Vignelli) in a number of areas including packaging, housewares, furniture, public signage, architecture, and interior design.

Massimo Vignelli (2009)

Quotes

• It is not enough that something — a chair, an exhibition, a book, a magazine — looks good and is well designed. The 'why' and the 'how', the very process of design itself, must be equally evident and quite beyond the tyranny of individual taste.
  • Biographical entry in Domus Magazine (Editoriale Domus Spa)

• We like design to be visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all, timeless.
  • Biographical entry in Domus Magazine (Editoriale Domus Spa)

• It’s a matter of discipline, and it starts by looking at the problem and collecting all the available information about it. If you understand the problem, you have the solution. It’s really more about logic than imagination.
  • The Vignellis, Julie V. Lovine, New York Magazine, October 18, 2007

• 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. So come and see A Few Basic Typefaces.
  • Poster advertising the School of Visual Arts' "third in a series of exhibitions honoring the great visual communicators of our time." February 22 to March 8, 1991 at the Visual Arts Museum; exhibition of the 'basic' typefaces Vignelli famously used for all projects. Poster reproduced in The Vignelli Canon, pg29 (2010). Vignelli comments further in the Canon retrospective that:
• As I said, at the time [1991], if all people doing desktop publishing were doctors we would all be dead! Typefaces experienced an incredible explosion. The computer allowed anybody to design new typefaces and that became one of the biggest visual pollution of all times. … I still believe that most typefaces are designed for commercial reasons, just to make money or for identity purposes. In reality the number of good typefaces is rather limited and most of the new ones are elaborations on pre-existing faces. Personally, I can get along well with a half a dozen, to which I can add another half a dozen, but probably no more.
  • (per above)
• We need to value meaning over form. For the past 60 years, we've put form before meaning. If, over the next 50 years, we put meaning over form, then we might get the proper balance.
  • Rochester Institute of Technology, News & Events. Vol. 14, No. 51, p.3. April 28, 1985
• How can you communicate without knowing the rest of culture?
  • (per above)

Quotes about Vignelli

• I learned an enormous amount from Massimo about how to be a good designer. But I learned how to be a successful designer from Lella.
  • Michael Bierut quoted in biographical entry in Domus Magazine (Editoriale Domus Spa)

• The most remarkable thing is their consistency. There’s no sense of the passage of time. Their work is not trapped in a style.
  • Deyan Sudjic, The Vignellis, by Julie V. Lovine, New York Magazine, October 18, 2007

See also

• Lella Vignelli on Wikiquote
• Massimo Vignelli on Italian Wikiquote

External links

• Vignelli Center for Design Studies Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)