The Vignelli Canon – A Design Education in One Book

How does one begin to describe the importance or the brilliance of the Vignelli Canon? Maybe by first establishing that it is the best instructional book about graphic design ever conceived — it is a perfectly reasoned and articulated manifesto on Modernist thinking.

I owned this book for months and had read through it multiple times before one day realizing that the cover design and the spine design are exactly the same — the same typeface, the same size, the same colors and the same alignment. This unified book jacket design underscores the thesis statement of the book itself: distilling information into its simplest form results in the most powerful communication. And one more reason why any object you own that was designed by Massimo Vignelli is usually the most beautiful thing in the room.

A PDF version of the book can be downloaded for FREE here:
https://www.rit.edu/vignellicenter/sites/rit.edu.vignellicenter/files/documents/The%20Vignelli%20Canon.pdf