Map Of The Day

A giant of the design world died today:

An avowed modernist, [Massimo] Vignelli is also famous for having said, “If you can design one thing, you can design everything.” And even if you aren’t a design nerd, you’ve been looking at Massimo’s work for decades now, especially if you live or lived in New York: together with his wife Lella, he branded American Airlines, Ford, and Bloomingdales with the logos we know them for today. They also designed Fodor’s travel guides, furniture you’ve probably sat on, and plastic housewares you’ve probably used. The two were recently featured in the documentary Design Is One, which if you can get a hold of, is delightful.

Graphic designer Michael Bierut was a young mentee of Vignelli:

Today there is an entire building in Rochester, New York, dedicated to preserving the Vignelli legacy. But in those days, it seemed to me that the whole city of New York was a permanent Vignelli exhibition. To get to the office, I rode in a subway with Vignelli-designed signage, shared the sidewalk with people holding Vignelli-designed Bloomingdale’s shopping bags, walked by St. Peter’s Church with its Vignelli-designed pipe organ visible through the window. At Vignelli Associates, at 23 years old, I felt I was at the center of the universe.

Joe Cascarelli, quoting from the NYT writeup of Vignelli’s death, provides background on the iconic map seen above:

[W]hen the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released his new subway map in 1972, many riders found it the opposite of understandable.

Rather than represent the subway lines as the spaghetti tangle they are, it showed them as uniform stripes of various colors running straight up and down or across at 45-degree angles — not unlike an engineer’s schematic diagram of the movement of electricity.

What upset many riders even more was that the map ignored much of the city above ground. It reduced the boroughs to white geometric shapes and eliminated many streets, parks and other familiar features of the cityscape.

It was replaced by 1979. “Look what these barbarians have done,” Vignelli said of the map in 2006. “All these curves, all this whispering-in-the-ear of balloons. It’s half-naturalist and half-abstract. It’s a mongrel.”

Examining the 2008 update, he added, “We belong to a culture of balloons. [The designers] grow up with comic books, and this is what happens. There’s balloons all over the place. It’s ridiculous.”

But of his 1972 creation — a “diagram,” he called it, because maps are for geography — Vignelli said, “Of course I know Central Park is rectangular and not square. Of course I know the park is green, and not gray. Who cares? You want to go from Point A to Point B, period. The only thing you are interested in is the spaghetti.”

For more Vignelli quotes, Popova plucked many from interviews he gave to Debbie Millman for her book, How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, as well as her podcast, Design Matters.