Massimo Vignelli famous quotes

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

#Opposites #Mind #Intellectual

If you paint a building shocking pink, that has no scale, it is just a huge mistake, but it's not in the scale of the city to have things like that. You know. So, not only because it's not appropriate, not only because it's offensive to the environment, I mean but among them also because that quantity of that color in the urban scale, is out of scale.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Mistake #Mean #Color

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

#Imagination #Discipline #Design

Greed is really the religion of vulgarity.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Greed #Vulgarity

If you do it right, it will last forever.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Forever #Design #Lasts

I'm not a designer, I'm a sifter. I can sift everything, all the time. My sift level lines keep shaking all the time for everything that is around.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Lines #Levels #Designer

There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Discipline #Design

I started to begin to be interested in architecture and design when I was 14 years old, which was pretty early in life. And then I would start to look at architectural magazines and I eventually went to the school of architecture too, but one of the things I learned very early is that an architect should be able to design anything from a spoon to the city.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#School #Years #Cities

If you can design one thing, you can design everything.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Design #Graphic Design

The pencil you leave it there, and it's dead. It doesn't do anything and it doesn't move by itself. It doesn't offer anything; it's totally submissive to you.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Moving #Submissive #Offers

Good design is ubiquitous and forever.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Forever #Design #Good Design

Scale is extremely important. Scale is not dimensions. Dimensions are physical and scales are mental.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Important #Dimensions #Scales

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

#Underwear #Consciousness #Grids

I grew up with a pencil. A pencil was my computer at the time and so drawing, drawing, drawing and the tools of drawing where the usual ones and eventually then you graduated from the tools when the work increases and you start to draw by freehand as precise as possible and as accurate as possible, and I was pretty good at that.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Drawing #Tools #Usual

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 #Firsts

You cannot play the piano by telling a pianist what to do, go a little more to the left or to the right. And the same is for the computer, really. You have to play yourself to get the most out of it.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Piano #Play #Littles

...if all people doing desktop publishing were doctors we would all be dead!
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Doctors #People #Design

The computer is really like a pencil, you know. It used to be. The pencil can do anything you want to, but you have to do it, and the same is with the computer.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Want #Computer #Used

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

The scale relates to everything. The thickness of a pipe, the thickness of a leg of the furniture. Even color could have a scale.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Color #Legs #Furniture

It is better to starve than get a bad client.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Clients

Scale is a mental - you can say that a lounger has scale, a building has scale, or an object has scale, or a page, or whatever if it's just right. A scale is a relationship to the object and the space surrounding it. And that dialogue could be music, or it could be just noise. And that is why it is so important, the sense of scale.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Space #Important #Noise

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

#Organization #Design #Information

Most of the manufacturers they tend to design things to sell they are more interested in the money side than anything else.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Design #Sides

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

#Fashion #Fighting #Doctors

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 #Needs #Culture

The computer needs...even by accident, offers incredible beautiful things that are very seductive. And if you forget about, or if you don't have an idea to begin with, it is very easy to be seduced and that is not a good use of the computer.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Beautiful #Ideas #Seductive

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

#Design #Style #Language

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

#Kids #Cutting #Years

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

#Issues #Design #Quality

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

#Fighting #Design #Designer

Design without discipline is anarchy, an exercise of irresponsibilit y.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Exercise #Discipline #Design

A designer without a sense of history is worth nothing
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Designer

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

#Talking #Giving #Design

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

#Powerful #Timeless #All Time

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.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Dog #Writing #Thinking

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

#Style #Important #Approach

There are people that thinks that type should be expressive. They have a different point of view from mine.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Thinking #Views #People

The repercussion of ugliness is endless.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Endless #Ugliness

Any color works if you push it to the extreme.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Color #Extremes

Designers take care of everything around us. Everything that is around us, this table, this chair, this lamp, this pen has been designed. All of these things, everything has been designed by somebody.
-- Massimo Vignelli

#Lamps #Care #Tables