"The way things work in communication design is frequently enhancing understanding, which is of course is at the heart of much of the Vignelli's legacy work," Richard Grefe of the American Institute Of Graphic Arts, says about Lella and Massimo Vignelli, the subjects of "Design Is One." "To the extent that the communication designer, the graphic designer, plays the role of the intermediary between information and understanding. The Vignellis have been messiahs in that regard, in terms of making the complex clear, for those of us who need answers." And while the documentary by Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra certainly makes a case for the thesis that the Vignellis were the premiere purveyors of simple, beautiful, striking and clear design, the film itself is a jumbled, scattershot experience that is all too content to simply gawk at their work, rather than investigating their methods and history with any depth. While...
- 10/12/2013
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
The contradiction of design is that it aspires to be both beautiful and self-effacing, shaping at all times our perception of public space and corporate image while remaining tactfully beyond our grasp, unauthored and void of meaning. Take the well-known New York subway map of 1972: It streamlined the inscrutable sprawl of the city's transit system into an elegant arrangement of color-coded lines, producing a diagram at once intuitive and geographically abstract. Naturally, the question of authorship arises: Who is responsible for New York's radical, graphical reimagining? Design Is One, a new documentary by Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra, tells us that the accountable pair are Lella and Massimo Vignelli, and, as it happens, their contributions to the popular im...
- 10/9/2013
- Village Voice
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