Strategic clarity: clear does not mean simple

In this Italian-language video, shot in front of Massimo and Lella Vignelli’s home on New York’s Upper East Side, I point out that for Vignelli, design had to be correct in its meaning, consistent and understandable, and I say that a good business strategy should be made the same way. Here I take those three levels seriously, as Vignelli wrote them down in his Canon, and I tell the story of the subway map that put them to the test: it is the shortest way to understand what strategic clarity is.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

Every day, millions of people move through the New York subway following a system of signs they have never really seen.

White on black. Helvetica. Colored lines. A quiet order that guides without imposing itself.

That system was designed by an Italian: Massimo Vignelli.

Born in Milan, trained at the Politecnico di Milano and in Venice, he came here in the 1960s with a clear idea: design is not decoration. It is logic made visible.

Vignelli did not design objects. He built systems.

The subway, American Airlines, Bloomingdale’s, Knoll. Every project started with the same question: how to make something complex understandable without simplifying it.

Today I am standing in front of his home, here on the Upper East Side.

A Renaissance building from 1907, where Massimo and Lella lived for almost forty years. Inside, only the essentials. They designed the furniture themselves. Among their guests were Umberto Eco and Arnaldo Pomodoro.

Vignelli used to say that design must be semantically correct, syntactically consistent and pragmatically understandable.

That is exactly what a good business strategy should be.

Because the most powerful sign is the one that works without needing to be explained.

Making the complex clear, without simplifying it

On an average weekday the New York subway records four million trips (MTA, 2025 figures), and the signs are designed for the point where riders have to choose: they look at them there and take the right staircase. The signs that make this possible originated at Unimark, where Massimo Vignelli worked with Bob Noorda, between the 1966 commission and the 1970 manual. The white on black and the Helvetica you see today came later, as I explain in the piece on strategic design. The network they had to make legible had been started sixty years earlier, dug largely by Italian workers. What has lasted is Vignelli’s criterion.

In the video I sum it up with a question: how to make something complex understandable without simplifying it. It is the same question the people who run a company ask themselves when they have a plan to approve, because a business strategy holds together markets, people, numbers and timing, and it has to remain usable. Reduced to a slogan, it becomes easy to remember and useless for making choices; left with all its complications, it goes unused.

Clarity is the criterion by which a strategy is judged: it makes a complex situation understandable without simplifying it.

The three levels of the Vignelli Canon

In 2010 Vignelli gathered the rules his studio had set for itself into a short book, The Vignelli Canon (in Italian, Il canone Vignelli). It opens with three aspects of design that, he writes, have always been important to him: the semantic, the syntactic and the pragmatic. These are the parts into which the American philosopher Charles W. Morris had divided the study of signs in 1938.

Semantics, for Vignelli, is the search for the meaning of what is being designed, and he found design without it meaningless (p. 8). Syntactics is the consistency between the parts and the whole, and it is crucial, he writes, in graphic design as in every human endeavor (p. 10). In the same pages there is a sentence that works as an instruction for anyone writing a strategy: “We love complexities but hate complications” (p. 12). Complications are usually added by someone who explains a complex thing badly.

Massimo Vignelli looked at every project on three levels, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic, and in his Canon (2010) he wrote that he loved complexities and hated complications.

In the video I say that Vignelli did not design objects but built systems, and the image holds up better on closer inspection. The stacking dinnerware he designed with Lella in 1964 is at the Museum of Modern Art, and almost all the furniture in their home, in a 1907 Renaissance-style building on East 67th Street, was designed by them (Dwell, 2018). A plate designed to sit on top of another is already a system. For Vignelli, design was a single discipline, “above and beyond any style” (p. 24), and it applied to a plate as much as to a subway: that is the step I take toward strategy in the video.

The 1972 map and the verdict of the people who use it

The third level is where clarity is decided, and Vignelli puts it as a warning: “Whatever we do, if not understood, fails to communicate and is wasted effort” (p. 12). A project can be correct in its meaning and consistent in every part, he goes on, and still be useless if nobody understands the result.

The subway put this sentence to the test with one of Vignelli’s own works. In 1972 the Transit Authority published a map designed at Unimark by him with Bob Noorda and Joan Charysyn, who was its lead designer: a diagram with 45- and 90-degree angles, a dot for every station, lines in bright colors on a light, neutral background (Museum of Modern Art). It was consistent in every part and sacrificed geography, to the point that Central Park looked more or less like a square (Jake Berman, Vital City, 2025). Vignelli defended it in public in 1978 against John Tauranac, who headed the MTA’s map committee (Dezeen, 2021); the following year it was replaced by a map more faithful to the city, designed by Tauranac with Michael Hertz.

Clarity is judged by the people who use the system: the 1972 subway map, consistent in every part, was replaced in 1979 because many New Yorkers could not recognize their city in it.

In 2008 Vignelli redrew the diagram, and in the Canon he publishes it with a line of explanation: it is not a geographical map, and distances have been altered to make it easier to read (pp. 10–11). Sometimes, he admits, a project needs an explanation, although it is better when none is needed. In 2025 the MTA presented the first fully redesigned map since 1979, diagrammatic once again and also designed for people who look at it on a screen: the verdict of the people who use a map, it seems, also changes with the way they use it.

Strategic clarity is measured by the people who apply it

Taken into a board meeting, the three levels become three tests to put a strategy through before approving it. The first asks whether it states what the company has chosen, including what it has decided not to do; the second, whether one department’s priority contradicts another’s. The third, the most neglected, asks whether the people who apply it know what to choose without having to come back and ask.

The first two can be carried out in the boardroom; the third is answered by the people who do the work, over the months in which they use the strategy. That is why we write the criteria for choosing together with the owners, and the company keeps them; it is worth writing them in the words of the people who will use them, and correcting them when someone cannot find their way in them, as the MTA did with its map. It is the most concrete part of the work on direction and priorities.

Having a strategy judged by those who will use it leaves the people who wanted it exposed: a department head may find obscure what seemed obvious to the board. Owners who accept this make a choice I greatly respect, and they prefer a strategy that corrects itself to one that merely persuades.

In the video I close by saying that the most powerful sign is the one that works without needing to be explained, and Vignelli asks for the same thing: that every piece of work should stand on its own, in all its clarity (p. 12). A strategy like this can also be recognized from the outside, but first it has to be clear to the people who work inside it, who are its most demanding readers.

What to do and what not to do

• Before approving a strategy, have it read by the people who will have to apply it, and ask them what they would do the next day.
• Check that one department’s priority does not contradict another’s.
• Write the criteria for choosing in the words of the people who will use them, and correct them when those people cannot find their way in them.
• Do not mistake a slogan for a clear strategy.
• Do not add explanations to a confused strategy: it needs to be rewritten.

Sources

• Massimo Vignelli, The Vignelli Canon, Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich, 2010 (reprinted 2015), pp. 8, 10–11, 12, 24; Italian edition: Il canone Vignelli, Postmedia Books, 2012.
• Charles W. Morris, “Foundations of the Theory of Signs,” International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. 1, no. 2, University of Chicago Press, 1938; Italian edition: Lineamenti di una teoria dei segni, with an introduction, translation and commentary by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Paravia, 1954.
• Museum of Modern Art, Massimo Vignelli, Joan Charysyn, Bob Noorda, Unimark International, New York Subway Map, 1970–1972. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/89300
• Museum of Modern Art, Massimo and Lella Vignelli, Stacking Dinnerware, 1964. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/4551
• Jake Berman, “From Point A to Point Q, and Beyond,” Vital City, April 9, 2025. https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-yorks-new-subway-map
• Marcus Fairs, “Debate over New York’s subway map was a ‘historic moment in design history’ says Gary Hustwit,” Dezeen, May 20, 2021. https://www.dezeen.com/2021/05/20/gary-hustwit-new-york-subway-interview/
• MTA, “MTA Unveils First Fully Redesigned Subway Map in Half a Century,” April 2, 2025. https://www.mta.info/press-release/mta-unveils-first-fully-redesigned-subway-map-half-century
• MTA, “Subway and bus ridership for 2025.” https://www.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/ridership/2025
• Paul Shaw, “The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway,” AIGA, November 18, 2008. https://www.aiga.org/the-mostly-true-story-of-helvetica-and-the-new-york-city-subway
• Melissa Dalton, article on Massimo and Lella Vignelli’s apartment at 130 East 67th Street, Dwell, January 29, 2018. https://www.dwell.com/article/legendary-designers-massimo-and-lella-vignellis-new-york-duplex-is-listed-at-dollar6.5m-71d066cc