Top 40 Massimo Vignelli Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you do it right, it will last forever.”

— Massimo Vignelli

Featured in: Design Quotes

2. “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

Featured in: Fighting Quotes, Fashion Quotes

3. “If you can design one thing, you can design everything.”

— Massimo Vignelli

4. “Graphic Design is the communication of information in an appropriate visual manner.”

— Massimo Vignelli

5. “Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.”

— Massimo Vignelli

6. “It’s the space you put between the notes that make the music.”

— Massimo Vignelli

7. “The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.”

— Massimo Vignelli

8. “In design, be logical, search for truth, be clear.”

— Massimo Vignelli

9. “There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.”

— Massimo Vignelli

10. “The repercussion of ugliness is endless.”

— Massimo Vignelli

11. “You do design because you feel it inside; you have a moral issue to spread quality in our environment.”

— Massimo Vignelli

12. “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

13. “Design is not art. Design is utilitarian, art is not.”

— Massimo Vignelli

14. “One life is too short for doing everything.”

— Massimo Vignelli

15. “Don’t be governed by the grid, govern the grid. A grid is like a lion cage – if the trainer stays too long it gets eaten up. You have to know when to leave the cage – you have to know when to leave the grid.”

— Massimo Vignelli

16. “A designer without a sense of history is worth nothing.”

— Massimo Vignelli

17. “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

18. “Greed is really the religion of vulgarity.”

— Massimo Vignelli

19. “A grid is like underwear, you wear it but it’s not to be exposed.”

— Massimo Vignelli

20. “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

21. “I like it to be visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all, timeless.”

— Massimo Vignelli

22. “Any color works if you push it to the extreme.”

— Massimo Vignelli

23. “It’s not important to develop your own style but your own approach.”

— Massimo Vignelli

24. “Good design is ubiquitous and forever.”

— Massimo Vignelli

25. “It is better to starve than get a bad client.”

— Massimo Vignelli

26. “Scale is extremely important. Scale is not dimensions. Dimensions are physical and scales are mental.”

— Massimo Vignelli

27. “Almost all the great American graphic designers have used white space as the significant silence to better hear their message loud and clear.”

— Massimo Vignelli

28. “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

29. “The only way to stay in fashion is never be in. If you are never in fashion, you are never out of fashion.”

— Massimo Vignelli

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “Most of the manufacturers they tend to design things to sell they are more interested in the money side than anything else.”

— Massimo Vignelli

35. “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

36. “I see graphic design as the organization of information that is semantically correct, syntactically consistent and pragmatically understandable.”

— Massimo Vignelli

37. “Design without discipline is anarchy, an exercise of irresponsibilit y.”

— Massimo Vignelli

38. “Middle management is a disease.”

— Massimo Vignelli

39. “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

40. “Unfortunately, there are designers and marketing people who intentionally look down on the consumer with the notion that vulgarity has a definite appeal to the masses, and therefore they supply the market with a continuos flow of crude and vulgar design. I consider this action criminal since it is producing visual pollution that is degrading our environment just like all other types of pollution.”

— Massimo Vignelli

41. “There are people that thinks that type should be expressive. They have a different point of view from mine.”

— Massimo Vignelli

42. “You can say, “I love you,” in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it’s really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work.”

— Massimo Vignelli

43. “If you do the best thing everyday of your life, but nothing shakes you nor shakes the table for you and others, it is stale and its not worth it.”

— Massimo Vignelli