[6] At the age of 16, he joined the Castiglioni brothers' firm, which designed in a wide variety of areas, to work as a draftsman.

The firm went on to design many of the world's most recognizable corporate identities, including that of American Airlines (which forced him to incorporate the eagle, Massimo was always quick to point out).

His clients at Vignelli Associates included companies such as IBM, Knoll, Bloomingdale's and American Airlines.

[24] It is alphabetically organized by topic, roughly approximating a similar course he taught at Harvard's School of Design and Architecture.

"[7] Vignelli worked with the National Park Service and the design staff at the Harpers Ferry Center in creation of the "Unigrid System."

Robert Noorda and Massimo Vignelli created a system of signage that the TA adopted and which still pervades every station in the subway today.

[30][31] The TA's new map, released in 1967, used Raleigh D'Adamo's principle of color-coding for the first time, but it suffered from what Vignelli called "fragmentation" and was not well received.

While the Unimark signage project was still being finished off up with the creation of the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual, Vignelli went to Ronan with a mock-up of part of the map for lower Manhattan.

[32] Ronan approved it, and in July 1970 the TA awarded Unimark a contract to design a new system map.

By this time, the map was almost complete, but was subject to corrections and modifications requested by Raleigh D'Adamo, who was now Head of the Office of Inspection and Review at the MTA.

The next year John Tauranac was made chair of the committee, which concluded in June 1979 with a geographic map using a trunk-based color scheme designed by Michael Hertz Associates.

Massimo Vignelli, Yoshiki Waterhouse, and Beatriz Cifuentes worked together to build a new, up-to-date map from scratch.

Besides the general principle of a systematic and minimalist design, they added the specific requirement that the map should preserve spatial relations between stations.

Their wholly new map was released through the May 2008 edition of Men's Vogue: within hours, all 500 signed prints were sold for charity at US $299 each.

[citation needed] In 2011, the MTA began to look at ways of displaying service disruptions due to weekend engineering works in a visual format.

[39] In 2008, Massimo and Lella Vignelli agreed to donate the entire archive of their design work to Rochester Institute of Technology.

The first one of its kind and size, The Vignelli Center will position RIT on the international forefront of design studies.