Posted this on Ben's Summer of Design Books thing last week.
[As referenced earlier this week] for holiday reading this year I took away Vignelli: From A to Z. To be honest, perhaps surprisingly, I didn't know much about Massimo Vignelli before reading this: there was the Subway Map of course, Helvetica and the Michael Beirut connection...not much. Now, I feel I know lots and while I can't say I totally agree with everything the great man has to say in his book, I really feel I've learned useful stuff and been reminded of many important aspect of being a designer; things I perhaps already knew but lacked the elegance and insight of Vignelli to be able to express as clearly.
The book is a collection of short essays, cunningly ordered to follow the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet and there's something of value to be gleamed from almost every one of them.
So what I've tried to do is attempt to extract just that, something of value, from each essay. Not necessarily the only useful thing and possibly not even the most important you may feel if you read it yourself; certainly, great benefit would be gained from taking the plunge rather than relying on my sorry attempt to summarize.
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