Massimo Vignelli
Massimo Vignelli’s lecture was the best lecture I’ve seen at MSU by far. Not only inspirational for me, but I honestly can say it’s changed the way I will now consciously think about design. He spoke a lot about how text shouldn’t overpower the feeling of the actual type written word. In his words, text shouldn’t have feeling it should only give you the message. This was something maybe very obvious, but I never thought about before. I noticed over the last few days that while watching TV or reading magazines I would keep my eyes on the lookout for font with feeling and the more I noticed this, the more I hated it. (This didn’t feel right because usually I liked wild and creative typefaces.) Throughout the lecture Massimo made it pretty clear he wasn’t too fond of the post-modern era. Another great thing about Massimo was that most all of his designs whether they be a poster, brochure, book, dinnerware, coffee cups, furniture, teapots or clothing, they all looked somewhat modern. Which I think is amazing because some of the designs were 50 years ago!I think that even if someone where to hate the typeface Helvetica or some of Massimo’s ideas of thinking in Design, they would still retain so much brilliant information from the lecture. I thought it was funny how he made fun of Market Research and took chances with his designs. People will either hate them or like them… but it seemed like in most of his cases people loved everything he did. Massimo was such a 360 degree designer, he literally did everything. It’s incredible! This I think this is what makes him such a respected designer, past, present and future.
