Latest Massimo Vignelli Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• If you paint a building shocking pink, that has no scale, it is just a huge mistake, but it's not in the scale of the city to have things like that. You know. So, not only because it's not appropriate, not only because it's offensive to the environment, I mean but among them also because that quantity of that color in the urban scale, is out of scale.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Mistake, Mean, Color

  Source: bigthink.com

• Scale is a mental - you can say that a lounger has scale, a building has scale, or an object has scale, or a page, or whatever if it's just right. A scale is a relationship to the object and the space surrounding it. And that dialogue could be music, or it could be just noise. And that is why it is so important, the sense of scale.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Space, Important, Noise

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Color, Legs, Furniture

  Source: bigthink.com

• Greed is really the religion of vulgarity.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Greed, Vulgarity

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Levels, Lines, Designer

  Source: bigthink.com

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

  Massimo Vignelli

  Design, Sides, Sells

  Source: bigthink.com

• The computer needs...even by accident, offers incredible beautiful things that are very seductive. And if you forget about, or if you don't have an idea to begin with, it is very easy to be seduced and that is not a good use of the computer.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Beautiful, Ideas, Seductive

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Moving, Submissive, Offers

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Play, Piano, Littles

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Want, Computer, Used

  Source: bigthink.com

• Scale is extremely important. Scale is not dimensions. Dimensions are physical and scales are mental.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Important, Dimensions, Scales

  Source: bigthink.com

• I started to begin to be interested in architecture and design when I was 14 years old, which was pretty early in life. And then I would start to look at architectural magazines and I eventually went to the school of architecture too, but one of the things I learned very early is that an architect should be able to design anything from a spoon to the city.

  Massimo Vignelli

  School, Years, Cities

  Source: bigthink.com

• I grew up with a pencil. A pencil was my computer at the time and so drawing, drawing, drawing and the tools of drawing where the usual ones and eventually then you graduated from the tools when the work increases and you start to draw by freehand as precise as possible and as accurate as possible, and I was pretty good at that.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Drawing, Usual, Tools

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• I started very early. I started to be interested in design when I was 14 years old, basically, and before I was just like anybody else, any other kid. I was playing with everything. I loved to do stage sets by cutting a piece of board and making a cut in three sides, flipping it down, making the stage.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Kids, Cutting, Years

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu