AUDASE

Legendary Graphic Designer

 

Massimo Vignelli, an acclaimed graphic designer who gave shape to his world

is spare, Modernist vision in book covers and shopping bags, furniture and corporate logos, even a church and a New York City subway map that enchanted aesthetes and baffled straphangers, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

His death, after a long illness, was confirmed by Carl Nolan, a longtime employee of Mr. Vignelli’s.

An admirer of the architects Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, Mr. Vignelli moved to New York from Italy in the mid-1960s with the hope of propagating a design aesthetic inspired by their ideal of functional beauty.

He preached clarity and coherence and practiced them with intense discipline in everything he turned out, whether kitchenware, public signage, books or home interiors.

"Massimo, probably more than anyone else, gets the credit for introducing a European Modernist point of view to American graphic design," Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram, a leading graphic design firm, said.

Mr. Vignelli’s work has been shown in North America and Europe. It is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, as well as museums in Philadelphia, Montreal, Jerusalem, Munich and Hamburg, Germany.

His clients included American Airlines, Ford, IBM, Xerox and Gillette. St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan had him design an 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 designed the signs for the New York and Washington subways and suggested the name Metro for the Washington system.

Mr. Vignelli described himself as an "information architect," one who structures information to make it more understandable. But when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released his new subway map in 1972, many riders found it the opposite of understandable. Rather than representing the subway lines as the spaghetti tangle they are, it showed them as uniform stripes of various colors running straight up and down or across at 45-degree angles — not unlike an engineer’s schematic diagram of the movement of electricity.

What upset many riders even more was that the map ignored much of the city aboveground. It reduced the boroughs to white geometric shapes and eliminated many streets, parks and other familiar features of the cityscape. Tourists complained of getting off the subway near the southern end of Central Park and finding that a stroll to its northern tip, 51 blocks away, took more than the 30 minutes they had expected. Gray, not green, was used to denote Central Park; beige, not blue, to indicate waterways.

"Of course, I know the park is green and not gray," Mr. Vignelli said in an interview with The New York Times in 2006. "Who cares? You want to go from Point A to Point B, period. The only thing you are interested in is the spaghetti."

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.

The map was replaced in 1979 with a more geographically faithful one. But in 2011, the M.T.A. warmed to the Vignelli approach: It asked him to reinterpret his 1972 design for an interactive map on its website. Called the Weekender, it tells of changes in weekend subway service.

The architecture critic Paul Goldberger, writing on The New Yorker magazine’s website about the map’s revival, called the original Vignelli design "more than beautiful."

"It was," he said, "a nearly canonical piece of abstract graphic design."

Massimo Vignelli was born on Jan. 10, 1931, in Milan, where he grew up enthralled by the city’s Northern Italian Renaissance architecture. At 14, he decided to be an architect, and at 16 he went to work as an architectural draftsman. He studied art and architecture in Milan and Venice and worked as a designer for Venini Glass, a renowned manufacturer on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon.

While studying at the University of Venice’s architecture school, he met Lella Elena Valle, whom he married in 1957. Both studied in the United States, then returned to Italy to start a design firm.

In the mid-1960s, Mr. Vignelli joined six other designers in Chicago to form Unimark International, which became one of the world’s largest design firms and among the first to focus on creating corporate identities through design. He opened its New York office with Bob Noorda, a Dutch-born graphic designer who worked with him on subway signage and other major projects. (Mr. Noorda died in 2010.)

Mr. Vignelli and his wife founded their own firm, Vignelli Associates, in 1971. It became Vignelli Designs in 1978. Mrs. Vignelli worked hand in hand with her husband, managing the business and helping with design. "She’s very much an equal partner," said Jan Conradi, a design professor at Rowan University, whose book, "Lella and Massimo Vignelli: Two Lives, One Vision," will be published in July by RIT Press. "Everything he did was touched by both of them."

Mr. Vignelli propounded the virtues of simplicity and rigor, suggesting that they could lead to a permanence that is unusual in the graphic arts, though he allowed that "trying to do timeless things is a dangerous game."

Mr. Vignelli’s reputation certainly endured. "He is fetishized by young 20-something designers today," said Mr. Bierut, who worked for Mr. Vignelli early in his career.

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."

But some designers saw his austerity as uniformity. "The knock was they all sort of look alike," Mr. Geismar said.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Vignelli is survived by his son, Luca; his daughter, Valentina Vignelli Zimmer; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Vignelli said he would have liked the job of developing a corporate identity for the Vatican. "I would go to the pope and say, ‘Your holiness, the logo is O.K.,’ " he said, referring to the cross, "but everything else has to go."