Our update to the 1985 chart on trends and movements, bringing it into the digital era. (For Metropolis Mag)
1 year ago →
Whatever we do, if not understood, fails to communicate and is wasted effort. We design things which we think are semantically correct and syntactically consistent but if, at the point of fruition, no one understands the result, or the meaning of all that effort, the entire work is useless. Sometimes it may need some explanation but it is better when not necessary. Any artifact should stand by itself in all its clarity. Otherwise, something really important has been missed.
Stackability is not accidental. It has been designed for that purpose. Piling up, you do with junk. Stacking, you can only do through design.
SD26: A New York restaurant designed by Lella and Massimo Vignelli.
The Vignelli home library: 50 years of print design.
The Saratoga, designed in 1964 for Poltronova.
If you are an artist, you can do anything you want. It’s perfectly all right. Design serves a different purpose. If in the process of solving a problem you create a problem, obviously, you didn’t design.
Steve Jobs never asked people what they wanted; he gave them what they needed. He had vision, courage and determination — to me, the most important attributes in life. His work will forever remain a beacon to enlightened industrialists.
T Magazine, August 2011
Choose things that are timeless. You don’t have to spend a lot of money. There are folding chairs that cost $10 to $15 that are great design, just as there are chairs that cost thousands that are junk.
Our favorite cups are plain white Wedgwood ones designed long ago. Five hundred years from now, they will still be beautiful. And they didn’t mess it up with decoration. There was no need to.
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.
A schematic chart of ideological and design changes. Also, see this modern interpretation.
Vignelli designed invitations to an exhibition on renowned architect, Richard Meier. Set on square cards using beautiful red Bodoni. Images via Felt & Wire.
Here is an example of interaction between one field of design and another. I call this the Bodoni Table, because the Bodoni typeface has big thick vertical strokes and very thin serifs, just as you see in this table.
This is a result of continuous cross-pollination between one experience and another. It is not true that if you’re a graphic designer, you can’t design furniture. You can design it, because design is one. The discipline of design is the same.
I have been a reader of the New Yorker for more then half a century and I always treasured the tremendous visual equity of its design. During its long life, many technological developments happened in the typographical field. Type design and typesetting became more accurate, but these technical innovations were not reflected in the magazine.
When we were asked to redesign the New Yorker, we immediately discarded the idea of a complete restyling and focused instead on the notion of restoration, as we would have done on an historic building damaged by years of bad weather and other calamities.
So we looked at every detail of the magazine, evaluated its merits and kept or changed them whenever necessary, with better alternatives. Therefore we changed many details, from the basic typeface, to the basic grid (it had not existed before) to maintain consistency throughout the magazine. We introduced color to better highlight certain sections and consolidated the structure for better legibility and appearance.
In the end, the magazine looked like a New Yorker after a shower.
Source: http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=3947
