Multi-discipline designer, Massimo Vignelli has designed and published his own canon, downloadable at your convenience: http://www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf
In a quick summary to spare you a bio-piece (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Vignelli), Vignelli is a contemporary designer, notable for his work on the Helvetica documentary and for the corporate identify of American Airlines. As mentioned in class, Vignelli is the designer who believes that our kind can live on a handful of typefaces. Originally, he limited his canon to four typefaces, but he has expanded it slowly over time.
His canon layout is clean-cut and functional, reflecting his personal philosophy of design. He follows a grid and a systems, and he has selected acceptable typefaces to exist within his system.
Vignelli’s Original Four
- Garamond
- Bodoni
- Century Expanded
- Helvetica
Vignelli’s Canonical Concessions
- Optima
- Futura
- Univers (the most advanced design of the century since it comes in 59 variations of the same face)
- Caslon
- Baskerville
As a designer, do you believe a design canon is necessary? Does the exclusion of certain designs (i.e. typefaces such as Comic Sans and Papyrus) imply the existence of a canon? Do you have a personal design canon? If not, why not or what would you put in it?
3 Comments
Great questions. I don’t think I have the necessary experience to develop a personalized design canon quite yet, but it might help in the future.
I’m very disturbed by this downloadable canon. With all of his rhetoric and examples, why does he use horsey body text with no line spacing and with no effective grid in place?
That aside, I think it’s interesting to see a designers’ preferences and aesthetic ‘tools’ put into a canon-like structure. I’d like to think that my work will reach beyond a limit of aesthetic tools as I hope to continually grow with the evolution of graphic design.
His grid reminds me of a simple textbook layout, which reflects the reverence I think he wanted to assign to the writing of his canon.
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