There’s a Crack in the Pavement
The day I met Massimo Vignelli I was a bundle of nerves. It was Spring 2011, my first time in New York City, and my mind buzzed from all the stimulation around me–the blaring sound of the taxi horns, the stench of pizza and garbage hitting my face, the hypnosis of the jumbo screens in Times Square. I scurried my feet throughout the city, eventually arriving at the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Vignelli lived. To calm my nerves, I peered at my feet, admiring the pristine blocks of concrete that beamed in the spring sunlight. I scoured, block by block, for cracks in the pavement. There were none.
When my eyes weren’t glued on the sidewalk, they were looking up, absorbing Vignelli’s design influence all around me. It was baked into the branding of the stores I passed, in the furniture I admired in the windows, in the subway station signs I navigated through. His work blazed a trail of authoritative Modernism–shaped by clean, geometric forms that asserted their presence, provocative colors that arrested the eye in its tracks, and a typeface that seared its way to ubiquity, Helvetica. “The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness,” Vignelli famously remarked. His rigor for simplicity and beauty remained constant, no matter the medium.
It was only then that I realized that I wasn’t merely walking through New York City. I was walking through his world.
At eighteen, I found myself driving along the open highway in my purple, piece-of-shit Chevy Cavalier, navigating from Ohio to Georgia. I was on my way to study Graphic Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, a private university known as SCAD. Dad drove behind me, in another worn-out GM Buick that broke down just as often as the last Buick he owned. His Buicks always had a way of breaking down, and this trip was no exception. “If it isn’t the transmission, it’s the engine. If it isn’t the engine, it’s the brakes,” he droned.
But we couldn’t waste any time. Dad had to get back to work at the bottling factory the next day. He plopped my duffle bags on the linoleum dorm room floor. “Alright, Lauren this is it,” he replied, hugging me tightly before making the ten-hour trek back to Ohio. “I’m proud of you. Go get an education, but be careful.”
Dad maintained a sturdy skepticism for the world I was about to enter. He had received a taste of it four months before my big move-in day, depleting his sparse paid time off to drive to Georgia with Mom, sis, and me, conducting a family assessment of the university. “What exactly is an art school?” Dad probed the recruiters, as his voice bellowed down the hallway. “How can you be so sure that Graphic Design is a job that will sustain her? Is she going to be okay?” Mom shook her head in fierce agreement as if this was the central question on their minds. “Yes, sir, she will,” the recruiter replied. His voice trembled as he looked at Dad. “Now is a good time to enter this field.”
I felt a twinge of humiliation as Dad interrogated the recruiters, but deep down, I knew he had every reason to ask. His skepticism emerged from the turbulence of his own career in manufacturing, one that didn’t match the attractive promises that were made to him. And now, he was on the verge of sending his daughter into an unfamiliar and expensive industry.
I didn’t expect to go to SCAD. My high school teachers had a different vision for me. “DAAP is one the best design schools in the world,” they said, referring to the public University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. “You must get into DAAP if you have any chance of success,” they said. “Memorize the application date, so you don’t miss the deadline.”
So I did. March 1. March 1. March 1.
But in lieu of portfolio reviews, DAAP sanctimoniously required an exam score of twenty-six on the American College Test, known as the ACT. The college tests rattled me with an unshakable fear. Even though I was on the verge of graduating high school at the top of my class, received awards in art shows, and worked multiple jobs after school, I struggled to succeed on time-based tests. No matter my skills or credentials, the standardized tests occupied the creative spaces of my mind, haunting me throughout each school year since the age of six.
I took the ACT seven times. But the highest score I could get was twenty-three, three points away from the required score of twenty-six. My test scores would later be known by psychologists as ‘test anxiety,’ but at the time, I felt like my piece-of-shit Chevy car. Regardless of my test scores, I still wanted to apply to DAAP, hoping that maybe they would let me in, so I sent in an application with my highest score.
But within a matter of weeks, a rejection letter came in the mail. I stopped reading the letter as soon as I saw the words, “We regret to inform you…” A flood of tears began to swell. After taking the ACT seven times, I ran up the stairs to hide inside my bedroom, gripped with humiliation. I couldn’t let anyone see the brittle clumps of black mascara that cracked across my face.
Going to college wasn’t merely an expectation but a mandate. Every adult around me, from parents to teachers, repeated the same phrase over and over again, mapping out a vision for my future.
“You need to go to college.”
“The next step for you is college.”
“You know that the application date to get into DAAP is March 1, right?”
Was this my future or their own?
But I had failed to get into DAAP, punctuated by the polite snub of a recruiter on a last-ditch-attempt phone call that I later regretted making. “I’m sorry, but your test scores do not meet the requirements. I probably shouldn’t say this, but maybe this isn’t the right school for you.”
In a rush of fear and anxiety, I submitted my college application and portfolio to SCAD, a school I stumbled upon in a brochure in the mail, and one that didn’t require a specific test score. Within a matter of weeks, an acceptance letter came, marked by the phrase, “We are eager to inform you…” It was a relief and a privilege. But the greatest obstacle was yet to come.
SCAD came with an annual undergraduate tuition and room-and-board cost of $34,155 in 2007, with a six percent tuition increase each year that I studied there. Mom and I sat at the cracked kitchen table, our heads collapsed into our hands as we scoured through every pay stub, tax document, credit report, transcript, resume, and professional reference we could find. The success of attaining scholarships and student loans rested upon a complete and thorough surveillance of my eighteen-year-old character and family finances. But at eighteen, I couldn’t grasp what a student loan was, let alone how to navigate the process of applying for one. Subsidized or unsubsidized? Private loan or public? What the fuck did any of this mean? Was I accepted into college or not?
Mom tried to find help, marching into my high school with the documents stacked in her hands. She pleaded with the guidance counselor to help us navigate the process. But it led us to a dead end. “We don’t offer those services here,” the counselor replied. “Well then what do you do here?” Mom snapped.
When the guidance counselor couldn’t help, Google did. Mom searched online and figured out that I had a better chance of receiving financial aid if we submitted the applications early in the year. Each year that I was enrolled at SCAD, on January 2, we withdrew $500 out of savings to pay an accountant to expedite our tax filing. We glared our eyes at the computer screen, coiling over every financial detail before submitting the application, hours, sometimes minutes, before the deadline. Every question formed into a perfect answer. Every signature signed on the dotted line.
Weeks later, the loans were approved–two public, granted by the government, and two private, granted by Wells Fargo. Each loan came with interest rates ranging from three to seven percent. By the time I reached my senior year, Mom and I had become financial aid experts. Even the accountant desired to learn from our expertise. “Can you help me apply for my kids?” they asked.
In addition to the student loans, I was offered a handful of scholarships, but the funding was often tied to the quality of my test scores. “I’m sorry Lauren, I know you’re tired of being tested,” Mom said, shaking her head with guilt. “But if you take the ACT again, and get a score of twenty-four, just one point higher, SCAD will offer you more scholarship money.” I could feel a rush of anger rising from my stomach to my chest. I didn’t want to upset Mom, so I stashed away the anger and took the ACT for the eighth time. But the anger refused to hide and ultimately manifested in my diminishing test scores. In the end, I wasn’t granted the additional funding, but I did receive $35,000 in other scholarships. It seemed like a lot of money. But it wasn’t nearly enough.
“You’re going to be in a lot of debt,” Mom warned. “But we’re all in debt. That’s life. I’m more concerned that there’s not going to be anyone like you at this school.” Her face twisted in an upward direction, as if she wanted to say more, but couldn’t.
But within minutes of meeting my new roommates, I realized what she wanted to say. They rolled large suitcases with wheels, gliding their possessions into the dorm room. They installed pop-up closets from Ikea, promised to nestle neatly inside a 200 square-foot space, but in reality, it absorbed the entire room. They unpacked unworn clothes, with the price tags I couldn’t afford still securely attached. And they transported it all in sleek, clean, sports utility vehicles with help from an entire family who had taken weeks off from work to carefully settle them into their new life.
“Let’s take a selfie!” their moms cheered. We shoved our bodies together as if we were best friends posing for the same photo, but our college experiences were already far apart.
Throughout my first year at SCAD, I remained isolated, closing the door of my dorm room so many times that the cold metal handle still haunts the palm of my hand. As the years progressed, I found some new friends along the way that helped me break out of the isolation. We cooked dinner together and drove around Savannah to catch a breeze from the humid air. They were even gracious enough to let me do laundry at their house. But I concealed my unexpected loneliness by diving deep into my studies, finding jobs at the university, and applying for design internships. The hustle of school and work was familiar, something I could grasp. The loneliness wasn’t.
But the loneliness created space for my imagination to run free. I daydreamed of meeting the designers celebrated in my textbooks, intrigued by the provocative typography of Stefan Sagmeister, the multifaceted illustrations of Milton Glaser, and the rigorous simplicity of Massimo Vignelli. I scoured their work, page by page, examining their history and philosophies. But there was one discovery in particular that piqued my curiosity. Massimo Vignelli designed a map. Not just any map, but a map of New York City, a place where my professors had lived and worked. “There’s a lot of opportunity in New York City. But you’ll need to work hard,” they said. The professors emphasized the importance of hard work and being at the right place at the right time. If you wanted to build your network or enhance the visibility of your work, location mattered. New York City mattered. I wanted to go to New York. And I wanted to meet Vignelli.
While I was a student, Massimo Vignelli was a legend.
As I searched through pages of textbooks and online articles, it wasn’t hard to find extensive details about Vignelli’s life and work. Born in Italy in 1931, he began a series of internships at age sixteen, with some of the most celebrated Italian designers and architects at the time, including brothers Achille Castiglioni and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni. Vignelli learned how to design lighting fixtures and a house in Venice, but eventually realized, “the architectural process was too slow if compared to the speed of the industrial design process.” This led him to shift his focus towards editorial, product, and packaging design. The more I learned about Vignelli, the more I admired his ability to decide and adapt quickly, even when a process turned out to be different than expected.
By 1965, he moved to New York City. At thirty-four, he led the New York office of Unimark International, the first consultancy in the design industry with offices worldwide. Vignelli co-founded Unimark with multiple partners, including Ralph Eckerstrom, former design director for the Container Corporation of America, Bob Noorda, a designer and colleague he met while teaching at the University of Venice, and his business partner and wife, Lella. The firm sought to merge the flashy, over-commercialized look of American marketing to the sleek, orderly aesthetic of European modernist design. They produced projects for iconic brands I had seen on billboards and TV screens–Ford, IBM, and American Airlines. “Most of the manufacturers, they tend to design things to sell. They are more interested in the money side than anything else,” Vignelli remarked. Despite this reality, his drive for rigorous simplicity never faltered. And it came at the right place at the right time.
In the mid-1960s, the New York City Transit Authority faced extraordinary challenges in helping passengers navigate the city. A surge of 52 million visitors in the 1964 World’s Fair illuminated problems in the wayfinding information, including signage and a map that showcased operating companies that no longer existed. It was a fragmented, tangled mess of outdated information, leaving New Yorkers confused and frustrated. According to Design Historian, Paul Shaw, and his book, Helvetica and the New York City Subway System, a competition was initiated for a new subway map design. The competition drew nine entries, but none were chosen as a winner. The head of the New York City Planning Commission, Harmon Goldstone, concluded, “a good map is not possible for a system which lacks intellectual order and precision.”
After the fallout of the competition, Stanley Goldstein, a professor of engineering, was hired as a consultant to design a map that would bring clarity to New York City’s tangled subway system. Instead of a design, he submitted a 39-page report that went beyond ideas for a new map but included recommendations for new station signage. To fix the signage problems, the NYCTA received a recommendation by the Museum of Modern Art to connect with Unimark, Vignelli’s firm. At that moment, Vignelli and fellow design partner, Bob Noorda, embarked on a massive assignment to redesign the entire New York City subway signage system.
“They first asked us to study four stations, as a test, you know,” Vignelli remarked, in a 2006 interview with Fast Company. “We did the studies on these four stations, the traffic flow, and all the analysis needed to determine where the points of decision were — because the whole thing in signage, the number one rule, is to give information at the point of decision. Never before and never after.”
But the implementation of the signage was deemed by Vignelli as “the biggest mess in the world,” as the NYCTA did not have enough money to pay Unimark to complete a design manual. The new signs were installed on top of the old signs–a potpourri of inconsistent fonts, colors, and shapes scattered throughout the platforms. Simultaneously, the subway system became embroiled in a project to enact major structural changes, linking two lines together. Passengers were unable to quickly comprehend the new train routes and transfer points, as the new signs were not fully supported by the route designators on the train. The Daily News described the new system as ‘flubway.’
By 1968, the NYCTA rehired Vignelli and his team at Unimark to complete the design manual, identifying where the signs should be placed to quickly aid passengers with the twists and turns of the subway. It resulted in the removal of the old signs and the installation of 3,000 new signs at 100 stations. By the end of the 1980s, the entire signage system of 485 stations transformed into the white-type, black-background, Helvetica-scribed signs. The installation cemented Vignelli’s mark of rigorous simplicity at a grand scale, easing the traffic flow and subway navigation for millions of passengers across the city. Never before had New York City seen signage like this and never after.
But Vignelli’s work with the NYCTA wasn’t finished yet. As the Unimark team completed the graphic standards manual for the signage, the Metropolitan Transit Authority formed over the New York City Transit Authority, chaired by Dr. William J. Ronan. Ronan was eager to bring New York City into the future, seeking to advance the subway map with a modern look that could match the bold aesthetic of Vignelli’s signage. Vignelli showed Ronan a mock-up of a map of lower Manhattan. Ronan approved it and awarded Vignelli and his team a contract to redesign a new subway map. According to design historians and blogs, the map was executed by Joan Charysyn, under Vignelli’s design direction–but if Joan Charysyn played a critical role in executing the map, why didn’t the media call her a design partner, like Bob Noorda?
On August 4, 1972, the MTA revealed the new map during a ceremony at the station on 57th Street and Sixth Avenue. Vignelli described it as, “Every line a different color, every stop a dot. It can’t get any easier than that.” But the map moved forward into production without community research, deemed by many New Yorkers as geographically inaccurate. It did not represent the street grid above, conflicting with the mental picture that New Yorkers held of their city. The map confused tourists, sending them to subway stops that did not exist. The water was colored beige, the parks were shaded gray.
Once the new map was launched, Vignelli had no further control of the design. By that time, he moved on from Unimark to create his own firm, Vignelli Associates, with wife and business partner Lella. But the swell of public pressure to change the map cracked the MTA’s decision, and six further editions of the map were produced from 1973 to 1978, with extensive changes. By 1979, they replaced Vignelli’s map with a more geographically accurate one, designed by Michael Hertz.
In outtake footage from the 2007 documentary, aptly named Helvetica, Vignelli reflected on the situation by stating, “The reality is that fifty percent of humanity is visually-oriented, and the other fifty percent is verbally-oriented. The visual-oriented people have no problem reading any kind of map, and the verbal people can never read a map…but the verbal people have one great advantage over the visual people, they can be heard. And that’s why they changed this map. They started to complain, these people, opening their mouths in vain until the beautiful map was substituted by the junky one that you can see now in every subway station. It is a map that is so loaded with information, which is so difficult to retrieve, that it makes the whole point of the map useless. If I had made a mistake here, it was not making the geography abstract–the water beige, or the park gray–it was just the fact of indicating those things when I shouldn’t have done.”
Despite the map’s geographical inaccuracies, Vignelli’s mark of rigorous simplicity caught the eye of influential figures and industries around the world, for decades to come. Brands displayed his logos, posters printed his graphics, fashion stitched his style, furniture constructed his vision, books etched his name, documentaries filmed his face, museums exhibited his work, professors taught his approach, and New York City cemented his legacy. “If you can design one thing, you can design everything,” Vignelli assured. And he did.
By 2011, the MTA asked Vignelli to reconstruct his 1972 map for an interactive version on its website. He agreed to do it, as long as it was called a ‘diagram’, not a map. But it didn’t matter what he called it. Vignelli was world-renowned as the designer of the New York City subway signage and 1972 map, celebrated as a landmark creation in modern information design history.
“Design, good or bad, is now part of our environment,” Vignelli remarked in a 2013 interview with Designculture. “It is around us and it has an influence on us.”
But the more I studied Vignelli’s map, the more I encountered unanswered questions. Why did he choose to design a map without accurate geographical representation? Why didn’t he listen and work with communities across the city? How did Vignelli decide what to abstract, and what not to abstract?
It seemed as if shaping a map came with a sudden position of power over what was truth and what wasn’t.
As I approached my final year in college, I ached for an internship in New York City. It was Summer 2010, and after applying to multiple positions, a few opportunities came my way. The positions held the attractive promise of adding credibility to my resume, the chance to work with celebrated designers, and the opportunity to enhance my design portfolio.
But the positions were all unpaid.
I couldn’t afford to work for free, let alone in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Professors, colleagues, and hiring managers would often tell me that this was a time to ‘pay my dues.’ But the dues to pay were insurmountable, as I watched the number of my student loan debt soar to over $100,000 by my twenty-first birthday.
I decided to return to Ohio for the summer, landing a paid internship at Procter & Gamble. Being back in Ohio allowed me to see Mom and Dad more often, which was good timing, as the shockwaves from the 2008 recession rippled through the family. Dad lost his job at the bottling factory. He cracked open a postmarked letter declaring that the company was reorganizing and his position was no longer available. The letter conveniently arrived ten weeks before he was set to receive his twenty-five-year pension. It was a twisted betrayal of Dad’s thirty-year career, one that confirmed the anxious suspicions he held for decades.
“I got into the wrong industry at the wrong time,” he said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes with his hands. “It’s all about tech and service now.”
Around the same time that Dad lost his job, Mom became diagnosed with breast cancer. This left her without health insurance, kicking her survival instincts into high gear. When the health insurance system couldn’t help, Google did. She immediately searched for the phone numbers of 150 hospitals across Ohio, calling each one in alphabetical order like a phone book, asking the same plea. “I have breast cancer and no health insurance. Can you help me?”
One by one, the hospitals denied her request, until she reached the letter J. The Jewish Hospital by Mercy Health received funding from the Ohio Department of Health, offering free cancer screening, diagnostic testing, and case management services to women who were uninsured. They answered Mom’s plea, and she began a series of radiation treatments–five days a week, for six weeks. Upon hearing the news of Mom’s diagnosis, I decided to cash in a portion of my internship paychecks to help pay for groceries, relieved that I had been offered a paid internship in a sea of unpaid ones. But the dream of going to New York City faded.
I continued to work at Procter & Gamble throughout the summer, sometimes leaving before 5 pm to drive Mom to the hospital for her treatments. I tried to hide this fact from my colleagues, but they inevitably found out. They were gracious towards my situation, offering support, hugs, and resources. But I felt guilty that I had to leave early, wondering whether it would harm my career from the get-go. I was caught in a tug-of-war, pushing towards a career that seemed promising, while pulling strings to help Mom and Dad. How do you find a balance at twenty-one? Do you push more than pull? Or do you pull more than push?
By the end of the summer, the internship came to an end. Mom’s health was on the upswing, and Dad found a job at a steel factory, one of the few remaining manufacturing jobs in Southwest Ohio. It seemed as though life was improving for Mom and Dad, but I felt guilty about leaving them as I drove back to Savannah for my final year at SCAD.
But as the guilt pulled, my career pushed. Three months before graduation, the university initiated a competition, one that would offer the top five students a paid trip to New York City. But it wasn’t merely a trip. It was an opportunity to meet with leading designers in the industry, including Massimo Vignelli.
My heart raced.
If selected, a printed portfolio of work would need to be completed in less than four weeks. I was devoid of any hope of being selected, but nonetheless, I submitted an entry, as the stakes in my life seemed higher than ever–on the verge of graduating during an economic recession, on the verge of entering into an unfamiliar industry that no family member had heard of before, on the verge of amassing $115,000 in student loan debt. All I could think about was the fear of what was to come. All I could think about was the push and the pull.
But then an email came. I was selected.
During the month leading up to the trip, I didn’t sleep. The sun came and went, in what seemed like a matter of minutes, but hours passed. My dry, bloodshot eyes glued to the blue light of my computer screen, distorting my sense of time. There was little time to prepare and every second mattered.
I wondered whether the other selected students were also working through the night, but I was too afraid to ask. We were competitors, vying to create the most polished portfolio to distinguish ourselves from the sea of designers looking for work in an unforgiving economy. We attended several classes together throughout the years, but I wasn’t sure if I could be their friend. The classroom was structured to reflect the real world, posing us as competitors, not collaborators. One by one, we stood before one another, pinning our work to the wall, bracing ourselves for the impending critique and subsequent feeling of exclusion. “Lauren, your craftsmanship is messy,” a classmate said. “Make it clean.” In some cases, it seemed as if the more critical you were, the more powerful you were. “Don’t take it personally,” the professors assured. Of course, the work was usually an insignificant sheet of paper stuck to a recycled piece of foam core, or tiny pixels on a screen. But I couldn’t help but feel a sting of shame with every critique, left in a state of bewilderment as to whether it could ever be possible to find support in a world that celebrated competition.
As the nights went on, the loneliness continued, until two of the selected students, Ramona and Kelsey, stopped me in the hallway. “Come work with us on the sixth floor. Let’s prepare for this trip together,” Ramona said. I released a sigh of relief, agreeing to join them without hesitation. Each night, we worked together on the sixth floor of an old, ‘historic’ residence hall, cracked with mold on the ceiling and rats in the walls. We called it Studio 600. As the nights went on, more and more students, across identities, disciplines, nationalities, abilities, and socio-economic backgrounds, came to Studio 600. It started as three students but quickly turned into five. Then, ten. Fifteen. The more we worked together, the less excluded I felt. I wondered if anyone else in this room felt the same way I did–hustling to graduate, and so damn tired of being alone.
But as Ramona, Kelsey, and I continued to prepare our portfolios for the trip, the more we realized that this opportunity was well beyond what any of us could chew. This request wasn’t merely a printed portfolio of work, but a culmination of four years of work, compressed into a timeline of four weeks, to be presented to the most influential designer in four minutes. Bursts of anxiety moved through us, as we agonized over every detail in our portfolios. Is this font too chaotic? Is this composition too messy? Is this spacing misaligned? What would Vignelli think? In between our bursts of anxiety, we napped for two hours, then worked for twenty, only to find ourselves waking up again, our heads glued to the stiff, cold metal of our Apple Macbooks. I woke up and looked in the mirror, peering at the curved bite of the Apple logo, imprinted onto my forehead.
As the trip edged closer, so did the anxiety. How were we going to afford to print and bind our portfolios? We scoured for cheap prices at print shops across Savannah, but it was too expensive. One of the students who came to work at Studio 600 knew a professor who had a printer, and he graciously let us borrow one. Without the community of Studio 600 and the kindness of the professor, we probably wouldn’t have finished in time.
After printing the pages, it was time to cut the paper down to an exact size to prepare for the bookbinding. But in a state of sleep deprivation, Kelsey sliced part of her finger off with an X-Acto knife. We wrapped the soggy, blood-filled bandage around her finger, cinching her skin so tight that it turned red. We refused to let the blood spill onto our pristine portfolios.
Hours before the trip, we bound the last page. I plopped onto the seat of the airplane, subsumed with exhaustion. This was supposed to be a thrilling opportunity, but I had no energy left to celebrate. I peered outside the plane window, tracing the lines of the clouds that puffed into the humid Savannah air, searching for a silver lining.
I am about to go to New York City for the first time. I am about to meet Massimo Vignelli. I am about to graduate.
These were privileged experiences that I thought would live only in my imagination. But now that it was real, I couldn’t help but reflect on the questions that Dad asked the recruiters early on in my college career. What exactly did it mean to be a designer? Was this it? A portfolio?
Was appearance all that mattered?
There were six of us who came to New York City–five students and one professor. We visited the Museum of Modern Art, ate juicy cheesy pizza, and scurried our feet throughout the streets, stopping at the steps of the subway stations. Our eyes glanced up at Vignelli’s signage, still standing over forty years later. We looked at each other, awestruck by this surreal situation of navigating throughout the city to ultimately meet Vignelli, using the signage he created.
We squeezed our bodies and portfolios onto the congested train, then crawled out of the subway and marched up the concrete stairs to the Upper East Side. As we walked along the sidewalk, I continued my search for cracks on the spacious pavement.
No cracks.
Then, I was called to a stop. “Alright, we’re here. This is it,” the professor said. We arrived at Massimo Vignelli’s apartment.
Foot by foot, we stepped through a canopied entrance towards a set of glimmering, golden double doors. Upon entering the building, an elevator waited for us, revealing a rich, wood-paneled wall adorned with gold trim. There was, strangely, a bench inside of the elevator.
“Whoa, there’s a bench?!” Kelsey gawked. I laughed, relieved that I wasn’t the only one awed by that.
As the elevator lifted, a tingle of nerves pinched my stomach. I clutched my portfolio close to my chest. We were in a deep relationship at that point, and it was the closest thing to solace I could find. Once the elevator ride concluded, I gripped my portfolio and tip-toed towards the apartment door.
The professor tapped on the door. We glanced at each other with quiet anticipation.
Lella Vignelli opened the door.
Her hair feathered back into a loose, white bun. She peered through her glasses to examine the circle of unfamiliar, nervous faces. The professor greeted her with a tone of familiarity and confirmation of our appointment. She smiled and nodded at each one of us, eventually glancing in my direction. But I lost track of any memory of how to say hello.
Once inside, I was transfixed by the space. It was an art museum of its own. Tall, oblique ceilings encircled above bright, white walls. A grand cathedral window beamed from the corner of the room, resplendent with geometric patterns. Textured planks of warm, dark wood stretched across the floor. Marble sculptures mounted on pedestals, the kind of sculptures I saw at the Museum of Modern Art. A printed version of the 1972 subway map suspended from the wall, crystallized inside of a glass frame. A perfectly squared, custom-designed black steel table commanded the center of the room. Only a few items had the authority to rest on this table–an asymmetrical lamp, a Macbook Air, and a magazine with Vignelli’s face on the cover.
While we waited for Vignelli to greet us, I dashed to the bathroom. I turned on the lights and found myself in a room of mirrors, from the floors to the walls to the ceiling, from the ceiling to the walls to the floors. Trapped inside a thousand views of my own reflection, I spiraled into self-doubt. Where the fuck am I? Who am I? What type of feedback would Vignelli say about my work? Is my work good enough? Am I good enough? How much time has passed? I turned off the lights and opened the door, shaking off the hypnosis before dashing back to the main room.
Then, a small-statured man with short, white hair shuffled into the room. He was cloaked head-to-toe in a chic, black, kimono-style outfit. “Hello, Mr. Vignelli, it’s nice to see you again,” the professor said. I could hear the cracks in his voice. This was a significant moment, even for someone who wasn’t a student.
Vignelli flashed a smile, then summoned us to sit beside him at the black steel table. He sat down at the helm, sharing details about his outfit, a one-of-a-kind treasure he designed himself. Then, he put on a pair of thin, silver-rimmed glasses and began to review each student’s portfolio, one by one. His eyes peered down at the pages, asking questions, and offering feedback. “The type is nice, but remove the complexity, it’s not necessary. If you remove it, it will make it more beautiful.” I looked around the table, noticing the bewitched look in everyone’s eyes as we witnessed Vignelli’s rigorous simplicity come to life.
The next student showcased his portfolio on an iPad. He lifted the delicate screen into the air, gracefully landing it into Vignelli’s hands. I could sense a stir among the group. We toiled over the high printing costs, the dangerous paper cutting, and the meticulous bookbinding. But this student arrived with an iPad. Vignelli brushed his fingers across the pristine edges of the screen, expressing admiration for the rigorous simplicity of Apple products. To him, Apple was the pinnacle of design. To me, they were a cold pillow that my head had dropped on when I couldn’t work anymore.
Then, it was my turn.
“Hi, Mr. Vignelli. It’s nice to finally meet you. I’d love to get feedback on my portfolio, and ask a few questions about your 1972 map design.”
I could hear my heart thumping into my throat. I scanned my eyes around the group, wondering whether they could hear it, too. I sat on my hands to keep them from trembling, eager with anticipation for his response.
Vignelli turned his face towards my direction and removed his glasses. His eyes widened. A strange smile stretched across his face. This wasn’t the same look that he gave the other students. This look was different.
Seconds went by.
No response.
More seconds went by.
Still, no response.
Then, he spoke.
“I wish I would’ve met you when I was younger.”
I froze. I heard the words, but I couldn’t make sense of it. He wanted to meet me when he was younger? Why? I looked around the table, scouring for a response from the others. No response. Did anyone else hear what he said? Or was it just me? Trapped in a state of doubt, I asked him to repeat.
“I wish I would’ve met you when I was younger.”
A rush of blood burned across my cheeks. A sting of humiliation punctured my stomach. My ears pierced with a loud ringing sound. It began to sink in. This was a remark about my appearance.
“Oh,” I croaked, struggling to make a sound from my petrified vocal cords. In a flurried reaction, I hurled my portfolio across the table like a shield, desperate to shift his attention away from my appearance and towards my work. The portfolio landed right in front of him. I stared at it, agonizing over whether I accidentally tattered its precise pages.
Please let the pages be intact. Please open the portfolio. Please stop staring at me.
After a few more seconds of awkward silence, Vignelli removed the strange smile and positioned his glasses back on his face. He opened the portfolio, peering down at the pages. Luckily, they were still intact. I could feel my burning cheeks starting to cool. Then, he began to flip through each page, one, two, sometimes three pages at a time. Flipping and flipping and flipping and flipping. Is he going to pause? Is he going to say something? Anything? What should I say? What were the questions I was going to ask him again? Was my portfolio not beautiful enough? I could feel my mind detaching from my body, losing all recollection of how to move my vocal cords to say the words I wanted to say. Before I could utter a sound, a question, anything, he closed the book, passed it over, and moved on to the next student.
I looked down. I could feel my confidence sinking into the black steel table below me. I longed for some sort of remark on my work, even if it was criticism. I longed to ask him questions about his map design. But Vignelli had another meeting to attend and it was time to go. We huddled together to take a photograph with him. On the outside, I smiled for the camera. But on the inside, I was crushed. The humiliation startled my sense of orientation, leaving me with no way to figure out how to stand up for myself, how to navigate my way out. Every muscle in my body, from my toes to my jaw, clenched with resistance as I concealed the anger that urged to crack out of me.
Was my appearance all that mattered?
I had heard of the phrase, ‘never meet your heroes,’ but every design classroom, professor, documentary, book, exhibit, magazine, blog, subway station, and map regarded Vignelli as a design hero. But what this media didn’t represent was that he was a human being with imperfections and biases. And his bias towards rigorous simplicity was, at times, too much for the subject at hand. It seemed as if he was looking at my own identity through a small lens, only focusing on part of the truth of who I was, and abstracting the rest.
But could anyone see me? Could anyone see the truth behind the path that led me here? What if I had felt more free to reveal this truth as a student? What if more high schools and universities had known what it felt like for your future to be determined on the basis of test scores? To amass $115,000 of student loan debt at twenty-one? What if more hiring managers had known how inaccessible an unpaid internship was? Would it have changed their perspective and policies? Or will I remain an abstraction? A line in a spreadsheet, a dot on a chart.
As we walked out of Vignelli’s apartment, I looked back at the 1972 subway map that hung on the wall. Did a designer’s relationship to truth matter? What if I found myself designing a map someday? If I did, I hoped I’d remember this moment. A map is a powerful tool, one that can offer clarity in a confusing world, but it cannot rely on the designer’s view alone. It must reflect the diverse perspectives of the communities around us. And it must embrace the messy, complicated truth of ourselves. It’s the rigorous pursuit of finding a more accurate representation of a place, which in turn, becomes the pursuit for a more accurate representation of humanity.
The elevator doors opened, returning us to the ground floor. I stepped out of the building, looking down at the concrete pavement mapped out before me.
There was a crack.
–
Closing Notes: Massimo Vignelli passed away in 2014. His subway signage still stands in New York City, fifty years later. Whenever I see it, I think of this story.
Between 2011 and 2021, the average student loan debt in the United States increased by 34 percent. There are now 45 million student loan borrowers who collectively owe $1.7 trillion.
Special thanks to Kelsey Lesko & Ramona Todoca for giving me the courage to write and share this story.
