Reflection of the Vignelli Canon

This was a curious read. Vignellis first points about semantics, syntactic, and pragmatic all brought up interesting points and to me the semantics or the meaning behind something is the core of all work. It’s essential for whatever it is you might be doing. My favorite quote of his about pragmatics was “We like Design to be beyond fashionable modes and temporary fads. We like Design to be as timeless as possible”…fashionable modes and temporary fads was a great way to word it.

He then looked at appropriateness, discipline, and ambiguity. All three were straightforward although vital to every piece of work. Part two Vignelli looked at the tangible aspects of creations and the importances of such things as paper size, texture, color, sequence, etc. You really don’t think about these things when looking at something but after reading what Vignelli said there is so much more to creations that what is expected. I found that his examples for each of his statements were spot on and helped grab a hold of what he was trying to get across. One of the most intriguing things I found about Vignellis work was his part on “White Space”. I am new to the term and before reading this I’ve never looked at something and thought of the importance of white space. He calls it the “protagonist” of the image and I could not agree more. In his conclusion Vignelli says “It is imperative to develop your own vocabulary of your own language – a language that attempts to be as objective as possible, knowing very well that even objectivity is subjective”…I found this very intriguing and inspiring and I hope that I can change my mindset to mirror this thought.

This was a great article and I learned a lot more than I had expected. I expected the article to be bland and somewhat boring but Vignelli did a great job of exploring every aspect of design and worded his ideas so that anyone would comprehend his thoughts. This was a great first step towards the start of design week!