Massimo Vignelli | Elegant designer, 83

Massimo Vignelli, 83, an Italian-born designer whose elegantly simple subway signs, business logos, shopping bags, furniture, and dishware became reference points of daily life and touchstones in modern design, died May 27 at his home in New York City. No cause of death was given.

Mr. Vignelli, trained largely in Milan, came to the United States in the 1960s with his wife, Lella, and together they formed a celebrated design partnership.

Their handiwork, renowned for its combination of beauty and utility, included the red, white, and blue logo of American Airlines, Bloomingdale's Big Brown Bag, National Park Service pamphlets with their trademark black strip, and the gilded covers of Fodor's travel books. Perhaps most notably, he helped lead the design of a short-lived schematic map of the New York City subway system.

Introduced in 1972, the subway map unknotted and color-coded the mess of tracks and tunnels and simplified their routes in straight lines.

While controversial as cartography (Mr. Vignelli opted not to depict parks in green and water in blue), the map was enshrined at the city's Museum of Modern Art and continues to be admired as an object of modernist design.
- Washington Post