Massimo Vignelli Quotes

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

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.

If you do it right, it will last forever.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

It’s not important to develop your own style but your own approach.

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

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

Any color works if you push it to the extreme.

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.

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

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

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

A designer without a sense of history is worth nothing

Good design is ubiquitous and forever.

The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think that type should be expressive at all. I can write the word 'dog' with any typeface and it doesn't have to look like a dog. But there are people that [think that] when they write 'dog' it should bark.

If you do the best thing everyday of your life, but nothing shakes you nor shakes the table for you and others, it is stale and its not worth it.