I started very early. I started to be interested in design when I was 14 years old, basically, and before I was just like anybody else, any other kid. I was playing with everything. I loved to do stage sets by cutting a piece of board and making a cut in three sides, flipping it down, making the stage.

Massimo Vignelli

Categorized in : Years Kids Cutting

Good design is a matter of discipline. 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.

Massimo Vignelli

design discipline imagination

I like it to be visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all, timeless.

Massimo Vignelli

timeless all-time powerful

The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design.

Massimo Vignelli

doctors fashion fighting

There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.

Massimo Vignelli

graphic-design design discipline

Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.

Massimo Vignelli

style design language

You can reach timelessness if you look for the essence of things and not the appearance. The appearance is transitory — the appearance is fashion, the appearance is trendiness — but the essence is timeless.

Massimo Vignelli

fashion essence looks

If you do it right, it will last forever.

Massimo Vignelli

design lasts forever

If you can design one thing, you can design everything.

Massimo Vignelli

graphic-design designer design

Design is not art. Design is utilitarian, art is not.

Massimo Vignelli

utilitarian design art

You do design because you feel it inside; you have a moral issue to spread quality in our environment.

Massimo Vignelli

issues design quality

I see graphic design as the organization of information that is semantically correct, syntactically consistent and pragmatically understandable.

Massimo Vignelli

information design organization

The first thing you need to make clear to a client is that you aren't there to answer his wants but to answer his needs.

Massimo Vignelli

answers want needs

A grid is like underwear, you wear it but it's not to be exposed.

Massimo Vignelli

underwear grids consciousness

Graphic Design is the communication of information in an appropriate visual manner.

Massimo Vignelli

information design communication

In design, be logical, search for truth, be clear.

Massimo Vignelli

truth-is logical design

So what is design all about? It [exists to] decrease the amount of vulgarity in the world ... to make the world a better place to be. It doesn’t have to be one style. We’re not talking about style, we’re talking about quality. Style is tangible, quality is intangible. I am talking about giving to everything that surrounds us a level of quality.

Massimo Vignelli

design talking giving

Don't be governed by the grid, govern the grid. A grid is like a lion cage - if the trainer stays too long it gets eaten up. You have to know when to leave the cage - you have to know when to leave the grid.

Massimo Vignelli

cages lions long

A designer without a sense of history is worth nothing

Massimo Vignelli

designer

Intellectual elegance [is] a mind that is continually refining itself with education and knowledge. Intellectual elegance is the opposite of intellectual vulgarity.

Massimo Vignelli

intellectual mind opposites

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.

Massimo Vignelli

age culture needs