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The Legibility Debate
It’s still going on, now in UX design
When I began writing about graphic design, the profession was polarized by an ever-intensifying debate between legibility and creativity. The battle was between the Modernists, personified by the late Massimo Vignelli (1931–2014), and the so-called Anti-Modernists who experimented with deconstruction and unpredictability, especially David Carson and the designers of Emigre magazine and Emigre fonts (which Vignelli had famously called “garbage” ). From the late 1980s the to the early ’90s you could hardly open a design magazine without reading about “the prison of the grid” vs. “the chaos of the new aesthetics.”
Because the legibility debate has been re-opened on Medium with various stories about web design’s lack of creativity and usability I thought it would be a opportune time to revisit this debate. Why, for example, can’t we appreciate both approaches, both schools of thought? As in painting or music, shouldn’t there be room for many styles, all of which are valid?
Following are excerpts from conversations that took place in the offices of Massimo Vignelli in 1996. They might be just as applicable to UX designers today as they were to publication designers back then.
Me: Ever since you called Emigre “an aberration of culture,” you’ve gotten a reputation as someone who makes dogmatic…
