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“The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design” - Massimo Vignelli in the film Helvetica
Purchase the flim Helvetica here
We also need to fight the boring - which to me can mean embracing something ugly if need be. Boring is terrible:-)
The successful designer has the interpersonal talent to distinguish the design disease from the client/patient. If the bad design you’re trying to “cure” him of is his own creation, if he identifies with it anywhere near as closely as you identify with your talent, you risk insult if you take this analogy beyond a certain point.
None of the terminology is qualified (What exactly does Vignelli consider to be ugly? etc.) which makes for a meaningless statement.
Not to defend Mr. Vignelli at all, but maybe he meant for example, in a quotation, the use of proper curly quote marks and a period at the end of the of the sentence, no double space after the full stop, &c.
I’ll make sure the quotes are formatted properly going forward :). I quite honestly never paid attention to that, but I might as well make them correct!