Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli is an Italian designer from Milan. He is probably best known for his 1972 re-design of the New York subway map. Although the reinvigorated design was only used for 7 years it had a lasting effect on how good design can reorganize visuals and incorporate simplicity into our life in a manner that perpetuates ocular pleasure. Vignelli is a designer who is still working today. He runs the Vignelli Associates design firm in New York City with his wife Lella. The couple have perpetuated design with a modernist leaning from there since 1971. Before that Vignelli started the New York branch of Unimark international which was a standard in the ad industry for many years and came up with powerful logos such as the American Airlines logo. His extensive work in the fields of furniture design and even architecture have yielded his famous remark " If you can design one thing you can design anything." This has held true across the years as the Vignellis have dipped their hands into countless forms of design. One such example of this is the Stendig calendar which Massimo produced in 1966. The calendar starts on Monday (in keeping with European tradition) and is characterized by it's monochromatic typefaces which
alternate from black to white as the months change. The large bolded font is characteristic of Vignelli's love of typography and is still in use all these years later. Vignelli changed the paradigms of modern design in America if for other reason than he took something as widely used as public transit and conformed it to the laws of good design by ridding the world of unnecessary clutter with it's strict adherence to the literal. I think a strong correlation can be drawn between Massimo and Otto Neurath