Italian design legend Massimo Vignelli, best known for designing an iconic-yet-controversial version of the New York City subway map in the 1970s, died in his New York City home Tuesday morning at age 83.

Working firmly within the modernist tradition, Vignelli aimed for design that was “visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all timeless”–a slogan of sorts for his New York design studio, Vignelli Associates, which he founded in 1971 with his wife, Lella.

“If you can design one thing, you can design everything,” Vignelli had been known to say, and he lived by this maxim. He helped shape the visual and cultural landscape of the 20th century with work ranging from branding for the likes of American Airlines, IBM, and Bloomingdale’s, to housewares, signage, books, furniture, exhibitions, architecture graphics, and interiors.





As one of the most influential designers of the past century, Vignelli won some of the industry’s most prestigious awards, including the AIGA Gold Medal (1983, with Lella), the first Presidential Design Award, presented by President Ronald Reagan (1985), the National Arts Club Gold Medal for Design (2004), and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (2005).

Born in pre-World War II Milan in 1931, the young Vignelli and his classmates would regularly have to leave school after hearing bomb alarms and run to a shelter. “I don’t know how I existed,” he told the Epoch Times in 2012 of his life before discovering design but “children grow up no matter what.” Vignelli also remarked on his luck, believing that if he had been born in the generation before or after his own, he would have either been part of the war or part of the national rebuilding effort, and not a designer.





Vignelli first became design obsessed as a teenager, after visiting the home of his mother’s interior designer friend. He’d never fully realized that most everything around him had been dreamt up by a human being, and became captivated by the idea. He started reading all the design books and magazines he could get his hands on, and sketching ideas for furniture he wanted in his room.

At age 16, he began studying and working in the office of a local architect. Since design schools didn’t exist at the time, at 18, he left Italy to study architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, then the Universita di Architettura in Venice. Soon, he was running in the same circles as architecture greats like Le Courbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, and Charles Eames. In an interview with Bigthink, he called his young self an architecture “groupie.”