What is The Vignelli Canon
The Vignelli Canon is a short booklet that Massimo Vignelli, an Italian designer who engages in modernism, wrote. Every one or two page spreads use images and text to explain the basic elements that must be considered when creating designs. These elements, despite being written in a time before the Internet, largely hold up today.
What does The Vignelli Canon say about Design
Vignelli discusses a lot in terms of design. Some of the concepts he discusses are big-picture concepts that make up the whole of making a design. Some of the concepts, however, are more specific parts that make up the big-picture concepts.
The elements that can be applied to the entirety of a design include semantics, syntactics, pragmatics, discipline, appropriateness, ambiguity, design, visual power, intellectual elegance, timelessness, responsibility, and equity.
Semantics in design is the message and meaning behind the project. It is the framework that the rest of the project is built upon, and the information that feeds into the design. By having a good understanding of semantics, you can target a specific audience and give the project a reason for being.
Syntactics is the syntax of a design. It is more than just the way sentences are formed, though. It is the relationships of parts of the project to each other and to the entirety of the project. Vignelli stresses the importance of syntactical consistency.
Pragmatics is how the design is understood. No matter how technically sound a design is, it can take on an undesired meaning if it is understood differently by the audience, just like the holiday Coca-Cola ad discussed in this article did. A design should not need an explanation to be understood as intended.
Discipline in a design means that every detail is intentional. The designer has their own self-imposed rules that they use to make each aspect intentional in the design. A good discipline leads to a design that is consistent throughout the entirety of it.
Appropriateness in design means that the project uses one of the many ways of solving a problem that works well without the extra force to make the solution work. It is an easy-to-implement specific solution.
Ambiguity in design is the many different readings and meanings that a project can take on. Vignelli explains that there is a hard balance that must be maintain between having ambiguity in a project and being in control of all elements of a project.
Design in this sense is a discipline with its own rules. It is a overarching aspect that can be applied to many different projects within design.
Visual power is the unique elements used in order to achieve a purpose within a design. Visual power, when used well, give the project a strong impact on the audience.
Intellectual elegance is the meaning and essence of a design created by a person’s mind. Vignelli believes that a level of intelligence creates elegance in a project.
Timelessness in design means that a project will last beyond the current trends of an era. A design should focus on a message to create a lasting design throughout the change of time. Vignelli claims that this can be done through a clear, simple, and enduring design like the one below.
Responsibility in design means that a project is created not based on ego. Design should use the most appropriate solution to a problem in order to solve the problem efficiently.
Equity in design means that a design is not created in order to replace history. Old designs that have become embedded in popular culture will persist, and new designs should not replace them.
The more specific elements include paper sizes, grids, typefaces, justification, type size, rulers, scale, texture, color, layout, binding, identity vs. diversity, and white space.
Paper sizes are the basic standards used in design. The two most common are the International A standard and the American standard. The International A standard is preferrable because it can create a square using two thirds of the paper. Paper size, when used intentionally, can have meaning to it.
Grids in design means the organizational structure of information. Grids are the basic structure a project can have, and they provide consistency and clarity to a project. They also prevent meaningless placements of information. The size of the grid should be intentional to the meaning of the project.
Typefaces are the fonts that text can be in. What you do with type is what is the most important thing about type, and typefaces should work towards organizing information in the most objective way possible. Type should serve a purpose beyond decoration and should not be entertainment.
Justification is where text is placed in a column. Flush left is the most common, and a designer should, according to Vignelli, shift the text justification slightly from line to line to improve the profile of the text block.
Type size is how big or small text is made. The size of the text should be considered in relation to the column the text block is in, and there should not be more than two sizes on a page. Vignelli suggests putting the headline of a design in large text and the body text of a design in small text.
Rulers in design means lines used within a project. Rulers create a hierarchy of weights in a project. When using rulers, type should always hang from it.
Texture in design means the range of visual experiences created by materials. The way that one controls texture is by controlling light in a design. The materials and finishes that a designer uses will impact the image of a project.
Color in design means the palette of colors used to create a project. Color is used as a signifier or identifier, and using limited colors makes a design clearer. Colors should be used to convey a message, and each individual color has feelings and connotations associated with it.
Layout is the way that elements are oriented on a page. It is up to the interpretation of the designer, and using icons in the layout can show information in the most meaningful way. The use of white space is the most important part of layout.
Binding is the different parts of a book design. It is comprised of the cover, spine, headband, and endpapers.
Identity vs. diversity in design means that a design needs to have a balance of unique features. This is to avoid looking too similar to other designs and increase attention on your project. Too many unique elements, however, can make the audience look away.
White space is the space that there are no elements in. It separates different parts of a project and organizes the elements on the page. It is used in order to add emphasis to the elements in the design.
My Thoughts on the Matter
The Vignelli Canon does great work in defining some crucial elements to design. I believe that the booklet is still relevant and still has things that it can teach to those who are new to design. However, I think that it is not universally relevant because of the way that it engages with more modernist and minimalist designs, and it also misses out on some information that I consider important to design: information that makes a design more readable for all.
First, it is important to mention how The Vignelli Canon still succeeds today.
It emphases how important intentionality is within a design. I talk more about intentionality in discussing visual storytelling, but intentionality is controlling elements of something you make in order to better suit the purpose of the creation. In design, you need to know a variety of things in order make a project that will say what you want it to say and to speak to the correct audience. Vignelli has more emphasis on intentionality in his big-picture concepts, but I believe that focus on intentionality is also underlying in every element. An example of intentionality in design can be through using colors on posters. For example, I am currently working on planning an event for the Fall. By intentionally using warmer colors like yellow, orange, red, and warm browns, I can influence the audience to think of Fall due to the changing leaves in our area of the United States.
Most of Vignelli’s elements are still relevant today, but I want to focus on aspects of layout like grids and white space. Grids, while they are not an element of design that I had considered before, are very important to me in particular because I am approaching design as a writer. Grids are so important to creating consistency in a one or more designs. Vignelli mentions books in the booklet, which is where grids are most important to me. As he mentions, changing the layout of a page within the grids of it from page to page can cause confusion or even cause someone to put down your book. As a writer, this is something that I don’t really consider much, but that I can use to improve my work. If I keep a consistent, intentional margin, for example, it will make the layout of my work fade away so that my writing can get more emphasis. A good layout design in books means that my writing get more of the audience’s attention.
As well, white space is important not just in visual art, but also in writing because it can control the pacing of a piece. The small space between paragraphs, for example, make it so that the audience’s brain breaks up the ideas in the two paragraphs. Something that I like to do in my writing is to add line breaks and white space to my prose pieces to create emphasis. For example, I may write,
“Alice tripped, and the next thing she knew, she was
falling,
falling,
falling
into the rabbit hole.”
In adding the white space in between where “was” ends and “falling” begins on the next line, I can add a visual aspect to the text that not only evokes the action of falling in the audience’s mind, but also emphases the action, as I want to do in this sentence.
Second, however, it is important to mention how The Vignelli Canon fails today. My major issues with Vignelli’s work is how he assumes minimalism is the correct design ideology, and how he fails to think about accessibility in design.
Many of the aspects of Vignelli’s elements that I have issues with relate to how he focuses on modernism and minimalism. In how he describes timelessness, he believes that trends and styles of a certain time period will fail outside of that time period. This is clearly false given how the 70s style of designs are still popular today, and how that design aesthetic is being used for designs today. For example, this poster template was on Canva’s, a popular design program, free tier.
In how he described typefaces, he gives simple examples of serif fonts and two sans serif fonts to explain how simple fonts are better than complex ones. While this can be true as readability often comes with simplicity in a typeface, it ignores how other font families, such as cursive families, can have benefits to them to establish a message in design. The are not simply decoration, as Vignelli seems to assume in his booklet. Finally, color can, and often should, be more than just primary colors, black, and white. As he himself mentions, colors have feelings and connotations to them. I cannot make a design for a royal ball without centering the secondary color of purple as it is associated with royalty.
Vignelli also fails to account for readability in his design work. As a disabled person and as a person who engages with disability studies, readability is incredibly important for disabled people and for nondisabled people. If a design does not have a good readability or is inaccessible, it fails to communicate effectively. In text size, while it should try to match the size of the column, it should also be 12 points or above for body text and 20 points or above for headlines. This larger text means that it is at a size that most people can read. In colors, while a small color palette can be good, it is more important to have a color palette with good contrast. It can be hard to read text on a design that has colors that don’t have a good difference in their luminosity, and if you put certain colors together, a design may not be understandable for those who are colorblind.
Readability of a design is the most important element to me next to intentionality.
Overall, Vignelli’s booklet is still beneficial today. It can be used in design work, but it can also be applied to fields outside of design like writing. However, there are more aspect to design than Vignelli describes. As well, saying that Vignelli’s rules are the only way to make a design fails to account for the ways that Vignelli himself is biased in favor of certain aspects of design.
That is what I believe to be true. You may disagree or think of more ways that Vignelli is not relevant to design. Please feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments of this post!
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