Massimo Vignelli Zach Cullen XCred

My expectations for Massimo Vignelli's speech were very high. Going to the speech I had hoped to really get inside the head of a great design master, but I felt that the powerpoint had so many slides that he didn't have a chance to just ramble.I expected him to come in with lofty smart people talk, but instead I just saw a funny old italian guy. Actually, I really liked that about him. It was a pleasant surprise. I guess I thought he would have some ingenious design adages or something. The closest thing I got to that was:

“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." At first I disagreed with this quote. I thought, "Oh he's just so old that he can't handle all this innovation." But, as much as it annoyed me, I couldn't stop thinking about it. "Could it really be...visual pollution? No. Well..." After a week, I'm not ready to swear of all typefaces except for Times Roman, Helvetica, and Bodoni, but I am going to concede the point that many typefaces are visual pollution. I think that in order to overcome the visual pollution, many designers try too hard to use unusual elements in their designs so that it backfires on them.

Actually, the most memorable quote was from that guy who yelled out "Yes we do!" When Massimo said we didn't need so many typefaces, he was so obnoxious.