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Massimo Vignelli is an Italian designer who was born in Milan in 1931. He studied architecture in Milan and Venice between 1950 and 1953. In 1957 he married Elena Valle (Lella) who was also an architect. In 1960 they set up the Vignelli Office of Design and Architecture in Milan. In this period Milan was a dynamic graphic design environment and Massimo Vignelli shifted his professional interests from architecture to graphic design. An important source of inspiration was Max Huber. When Massimo moved to the United States about 1965, he became co-founder of Unimark International Corporation. In 1971 he opened, along with Lella, Vignelli Associates, and in 1978 Vignelli Designs was established. Massimo Vignelli died in New York on May 27, 2014.

Many of his landmark projects are now archetypes in the history of design, namely, the corporate identity program for American Airlines (1967), the graphics program for the United States National Park Service (1977), the design of St. Peter’s Church in New York (1977) and the original subway map for New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (1970).

His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Montreal and Die Neue Sammlung in Munich. Exhibitions of Vignelli’s work have been shown internationally. A major exhibit titled Design: Vignelli toured Europe between 1989 and 1993.

Massimo is honoured with numerous awards including an honorary doctorate from Rochester Institute of Technology, New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1982, AIGA Gold Medal, the first Presidential Design Award in 1975, and the Medalist Award from the Architectural League in 2010.
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