RIP, Massimo Vignelli—who had a great idea for the pope

The New York Times notes the passing of a legend: 

Massimo Vignelli, an acclaimed graphic designer who gave shape to his spare, Modernist vision in book covers and shopping bags, furniture and corporate logos, even a church and a New York City subway map that enchanted aesthetes and baffled straphangers, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

His death, after a long illness, was confirmed by Carl Nolan, a longtime employee of Mr. Vignelli’s.

An admirer of the architects Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, Mr. Vignelli moved to New York from Italy in the mid-1960s with the hope of propagating a design aesthetic inspired by their ideal of functional beauty.

He preached clarity and coherence and practiced them with intense discipline in everything he turned out, whether kitchenware, public signage, books or home interiors.

“Massimo, probably more than anyone else, gets the credit for introducing a European Modernist point of view to American graphic design,” Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram, a leading graphic design firm, said.

 His clients included American Airlines, Ford, IBM, Xerox and Gillette. St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan had him design an entire church. His brochures for the National Park Service are still used. Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys all gave out Vignelli-designed shopping bags in the 1970s. He designed the signs for the New York and Washington subways and suggested the name Metro for the Washington system.

Mr. Vignelli described himself as an “information architect,” one who structures information to make it more understandable. But when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released his new subway map in 1972, many riders found it the opposite of understandable. Rather than representing 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.

I love this closing remark, though, which is more profound than he may have realized:

Mr. Vignelli said he would have liked the job of developing a corporate identity for the Vatican. “I would go to the pope and say, ‘Your holiness, the logo is O.K.,’ ” he said, referring to the cross, “but everything else has to go.”

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him…