Strategic design: giving form to a company’s choices

In this Italian-language video, shot in New York, I start with Massimo Vignelli and the subway to say that good visual design is a form of applied strategy. Here I tell the story of that system, which is longer and more instructive than it looks from the street, and I bring in Roberto Verganti, who has studied how Italian design companies innovate.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

In the past few days I happened to walk past Massimo Vignelli’s New York apartment. He was one of the great masters of Italian design, and he chose the Upper East Side, here in New York, as the place to live and work until his death.

The New York subway, like the visual identities of a great many prestigious companies, still moves within a visual system that bears his signature.

It is proof that a simple, logical, functional way of thinking, born in Italy, can become a universal language.

Italian design has always had this strength: turning culture into method and beauty into structure.

And this is exactly where business strategy meets design.

An important part of my work, in fact, is coordinating designers, photographers and creatives, and working in dialogue with them, to build visual identities that are solid, consistent and credible.

Because it is also through design that a company reaches international markets, earns trust and attracts investors.

Good visual design is never just a matter of aesthetics. It is a form of applied strategy.

Italy taught the world that the precision of design can be an economic language, and today that lesson is still alive, even in the way we design technology products and global companies.

For me, strategy also runs through this: the way we think, design and make recognizable what we want to grow.

The subway system bears two signatures, and it has lasted sixty years

The sign system of the New York subway has a precise date of birth. In May 1966 the Transit Authority, on the advice of the Museum of Modern Art, gave the job to Unimark International, the firm where Massimo Vignelli ran the New York office. Bob Noorda, a Dutchman who had settled in Milan, was also at Unimark, and he had already designed the signage for the Milan metro. Noorda observed how passengers moved; together they built a system of modular signs, collected in 1970 in the Graphics Standards Manual. The first signs were black on a white background, in the Standard Medium typeface, chosen because it read well from every angle.

The white-on-black signs and the Helvetica that anyone entering the subway sees everywhere today came later. The Transit Authority reversed the colors around 1973, and Helvetica became the official standard only in December 1989, with a new manual (Paul Shaw, AIGA, 2008). The system has changed its look several times and survived, because its strength lay in its logic: the right sign at the point where the passenger has to decide, and no other.

Design becomes strategy when it gives form to a choice already made; when it replaces that choice, it remains decoration.

The New York subway is an almost textbook example. The choice came first: a network formed by merging three different companies, each with its own signs, had to become legible. The form came afterward, and that is why it could change its appearance without losing its meaning.

Italian design companies innovate what products mean

Roberto Verganti is a scholar of innovation and for many years a professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Milan’s technical university. In 2009 he published Design-Driven Innovation (the Italian edition, from Etas, came out the same year). The book’s thesis is that a decisive part of innovation concerns the meaning of products more than their function: why people buy them, what they say about the people who use them. And these innovations, Verganti writes, create their own market instead of arising from listening to the existing one.

His cases are largely Italian. Artemide, with Metamorfosi, brought to market a lamp that adjusts the colored light in a room, changing the very idea of what a lamp is. Alessi, from the 1980s on, turned kitchenware into objects of affection, like the kettle Michael Graves designed in 1985. Kartell used the possibilities of plastics to make objects that could not be made before.

Roberto Verganti showed that Italian design companies innovate above all the meaning of their products, even before their functions.

One point in the book directly concerns the people who run a company. These companies work with a network of interpreters: designers, artists, technology suppliers, scholars, people who know the markets they work in thoroughly and influence them. The proposed meaning takes shape in discussion with them, and it is the company that decides on it. The designer brings an interpretation, and the company chooses what to do with it.

In everyday work, design is proof of the choices

In the video I say that an important part of my work is the dialogue with designers, photographers and creatives. I did this for years from the inside, as a graphic designer and art director, and today I do it from another side: I am the link between the owners and the people who produce the work, so that the form follows the decisions made about the company’s identity and positioning. The projects are signed by the people who design them. My task is to make sure that what they design is the visible trace of choices the company has already made and can defend.

That is why the dialogue with creatives works best when it comes at the right moment. An agency that is asked for a new logo before the company has decided who it is will skillfully design an answer to a question no one has asked. I say the same in my answer to people who ask whether I replace their agency or marketing director: I work alongside them, before and during the work, so that their talent has a clear brief.

A good visual system also outlasts its authors. Vignelli died in 2014. In 2025 the MTA, which runs the system, presented a new subway map that draws on the geometric layout of his 1972 map. A design that returns after half a century is the mark of a logic that did not depend on the fashion of the moment.

When form comes before the choices

Form also has a limit. A consistent visual system can make a confused company look more elegant, but the company remains confused, and customers notice the first time a product, or a person, says something different.

A consistent visual system does not save a company that has not decided who it is: the consistency of the form depends on the consistency of the choices.

My article on corporate identity ends with the same reasoning: first you write down what the company is and what it is not, then come language, form and positioning. A business strategy that has done that work finds its most visible proof in design. One that has not finds in design, at most, a handsome disguise.

What to do and what not to do

• Decide and write down who the company is before asking for a logo, a website or a campaign.
• Give designers a clear brief, and leave the form to them.
• Judge a visual design project by how legible it makes the choices, as well as by its aesthetics.
• Do not change the visual identity to make up for a strategy that does not exist.
• Do not confuse the style of the moment with the logic that has to last.

Sources

• Roberto Verganti, Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean, Harvard Business Press, 2009 (Italian edition: Design-Driven Innovation. Cambiare le regole della competizione innovando radicalmente il significato dei prodotti e dei servizi, Etas, 2009).
• 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
• Museum of Modern Art, New York Subway Map, Massimo Vignelli, Joan Charysyn, Bob Noorda, Unimark International, 1970–1972. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/89300
• New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual, Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda, Unimark International, 1970; facsimile edition, Standards Manual, 2014. https://standardsmanual.com/products/nycta-graphics-standards-manual-full-size-edition
• MTA, “MTA Unveils First Fully Redesigned Subway Map in Half a Century,” 2025. https://www.mta.info/press-release/mta-unveils-first-fully-redesigned-subway-map-half-century