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For more than 40 years Massimo Vignelli has been in a professional partnership with his wife, the architect and designer Lella Vignelli. They took Italian design to New York, fusing their understanding of the aesthetics of modernism with the professionalism of the American industrial design consultancy. Massimo directs the partnership's graphic design work, while Lella leads the furniture and architectural projects. Vignelli studied architecture in Milan and Venice. He became a friend of Max Huber, who introduced to him the ideas of Swiss typography, an approach based on grids, sequencing and dynamic relationships of scale that would
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become important for Vignelli's subsequent designs. Between 1957 and 1960
Q Studied architecture in Miian, Venice and at IfT, Illinois 8 Fo~rnedpartnership with wife, LeEta Vignelti, first in Milan and later in New kfork B Major designs for New York Metropolitan Transit Authority 6 Vignelli Associates and Vignelli Oesigns founded a g p @ International clients i n design, architecture and publishing
Vignelli studied in the United States on a scholarship. In 1960, after his return to Milan, the initial version of the partnership was formed, the Vignelli Office of Design and Architecture. One of the first celebrated graphic designs was for the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. In 1965 Vignelli co-founded Unimark International Corporation with Bob Noorda, the Dutch graphic designer and former art director at Pirelli in Milan. One of their first major commissions, on which they began work in 1966, was to redesign the graphic programme for the New York subway system. After analysing traffic flow, Vignelli and Noorda devised a modular system of units for the signage that could be put together to perform the role of informational sentences, with square panels to indicate line numbers and other directions. The system was standardized yet more flexible than the previous signs that had been made individually for each site. A commission for a map of the system followed in 1970. The result was a successful combination of a rational approach and research based on observation, but in 1979 it was replaced with a more conventional design. In 1971 the offices of Vignelli Associates and Vignelli Designs opened in New York. As one
Vignelli has designed many books on architecture for the publisher Rizzoli, including this title, which was contributed by the United States to the Venice Biennale in 1993.
commentator has said, Vignelli established Helvetica as "the default typeface for corporate America". Other hallmarks of his graphic style are a dominant use of red and black and of the classic typefaces Bodoni, Times, Garamond, Century and Futura. In the introduction to the Graphis annual of 1983 Vignelli commented: "Historical information,
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introspection and interpretation are almost totally missing in our profession." His point of view prefigured the rise in the lggos of critical writing on graphic design. Nevertheless, although Vignelli encouraged a debate which was central to postmodernism, his personal style remained
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thoroughly embedded in modernism. In his l g g i
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essay "Long Live Modernism" he reasserted the
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role of design to improve the visual environment:
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"Post-modernism should be regarded at best as a critical evaluation of the issues of Modernism."