18 Facts About Massimo Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli's motto was "If you can design one thing, you can design everything," a philosophy reflected in the broad range of his work.

Massimo Vignelli's style emphasized simplicity through using basic geometric shapes.

Massimo Vignelli studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and later at the Universita Iuav di Venezia.

Contrary to news reports, Massimo Vignelli did not design the Washington Metro Map, which was designed by Lance Wyman and Bill Cannan.

Massimo Vignelli created the signage and wayfinding system for the DC Metro and suggested it be named "Metro" like many other capital city subways.

In 1971, Massimo Vignelli resigned from Unimark, in part because the design vision which he supported became diluted as the company diversified and increasingly stressed marketing, rather than design.

Massimo Vignelli worked with filmmaker Gary Hustwit on the documentary Helvetica, about the typeface of the same name.

Massimo Vignelli died on May 27,2014, at the age of 83 in New York City.

Massimo Vignelli worked in a wide variety of areas, including interior design, environmental design, package design, graphic design, furniture design, and product design.

Massimo Vignelli participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007, as well as publishing the book, Massimo Vignelli: From A to Z, containing a series of essays describing the principles and concepts behind "all good design".

Massimo Vignelli's designs were famous for following a minimal aesthetic and a narrow range of typefaces that Massimo Vignelli considered to be perfect in their genre, including Akzidenz-Grotesk, Bodoni, Helvetica, Garamond No 3 and Century Expanded.

In January 2009, Massimo Vignelli released The Massimo Vignelli Canon as a free e-book; an expanded version was printed in September 2010.

Massimo Vignelli regarded the map as one of his finest creations.

When Unimark International opened an office in New York in 1965, Mildred Constantine, curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art put Ingalls in touch with Massimo Vignelli, who headed up the New York office from the end of 1965.

Robert Noorda and Massimo Vignelli created a system of signage that the TA adopted and which still pervades every station in the subway today.

The TA's new map, released in 1967, used Raleigh D'Adamo's principle of color-coding for the first time, but it suffered from what Massimo Vignelli called "fragmentation" and was not well received.

Massimo Vignelli recruited Fred Wilkinson from Macy's who formed the Subway Map Committee in 1975 to design a new map to replace Vignelli's.

The last map in which Massimo Vignelli was involved was a special transit map, designed by Yoshiki Waterhouse at Massimo Vignelli Associates, for Super Bowl XLVIII.