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95 Design Advocacy Other designers may be as prolific as the Vignellis, but few are as completely engaged. Lella and Massimo continually added new roles and responsibilities to their schedules. Pride and pleasure in creating design solutions is only one aspect of their professional lives—they also feel an obligation to the world of design that demands their attention, criticism, and support. They have consistently worked to uplift and inspire the design profession from within; at the same time they have been visible and vocal at promoting societal advancement through design. This activism has been a defining attribute of the Vignellis since their student years at the University of Venice. They have been active in many professional architecture and design organizations, Lella most often working behind the scenes, while Massimo held offices. He served terms as president of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and AIGA, and as vice president of the Architectural League of New York. They attend, often as presenters, national and international conferences and symposiums. They have been consultants to governments and business. They have served on juries and advisory boards, and offered critiques for industry, professionals, and students. Massimo nominated and endorsed fellow designers for professional awards and memberships. Separately and as a team, they amassed a staggering number of lectures, workshops, presentations, interviews, and exhibitions at venues around the world. Universities wanted their time: could they assist in identifying potentially visionary leaders for a school’s design program? Would they be willing to visit campus and meet with students? Might a group of students come to visit their office? They said yes to these requests more than they said no. In 1986, Lella was on the jury for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Presidential Design Awards. That group, chaired by Lou Dorfsman, prepared a statement about standards for communications. Lella’s attitude is evident in the statement’s wording: “All design, government or private sector, should aspire to enhance its subject matter over and above merely 96 reflecting it. The issue should not be the highlighting of individual items, but rather the overall improvement of standards…” Her input on design issues at a national level continued, as evidenced by correspondence with Donald Meeker. Meeker, whose firm specializes in graphic and environmental design, was working on the NEA Federal Graphics Improvement Program in 1989. He wrote to Lella saying, “I am not sure that there is enough understanding of what a federal design policy is, and I hope that the bureaucracy of the immediate past will not cloud the real issues when creating a future for this program.” He asked for her assistance with “any ideas that might help shape this process.”1 Massimo has contributed numerous articles to design journals. His approach in speaking and writing is often laced with humor, and he is not afraid of using attention-getting emotional outbursts to drive home a point. Lella was more verbal than literary, but at times she wrote descriptive and enlightening letters to clients. Her matter-of-fact approach provided them with insight into the breadth of a designer’s thoughts on such issues as functionality, code compliance, cost effectiveness, and visual impact. Lella was concise. Clients listened because of her logic. In one situation, she was advising a client whose existing office was literally and figuratively too noisy in both audio and visual ways. “Rethinking the materials of these areas is, in my opinion, a good chance to simplify an expensive and fussy solution.” She also critiqued the client’s office furniture, writing that one chair was “too small and delicate in construction,” and other club chairs were “not appropriate, in my opinion, for the size of the office. They are too low in relation to their distance to the desk.”2 The Vignellis are confident and articulate. People trust them and pay attention, though of course not everyone agrees with their approach. Only rarely were client relationships terminated. Often the threat of termination was enough to resolve an impasse. Designer Rocco Piscatello said, “Massimo would ‘fire’ clients who weren’t meeting standards. He’d type a memo saying, ‘You aren’t seeing what we are seeing.’ He would fax that memo and you could count on a phone call from the client twenty seconds later: ‘We’re so sorry!’”3 Piscatello said, “The Vignellis are from a generation when people didn’t know what design was. Remember, we’re talking about the 1950s and ’60s, when the only people who needed graphic design...

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