Poster, IDCNY Welcomes the 1988 AIA Convention

A collaboration between Italian-born designer, Massimo Vignelli, and protégé, Michael Bierut, this poster was created for the International Design Center of New York (IDCNY) to promote the American Institute of Architects 120th annual convention. Although the AIA was founded in New York in 1857, the professional society hosted its 1988 convention in New York for the first time since 1967. As is customary with Vignelli’s approach to graphic design, a simple color scheme, a limited number of type families, and employment of a grid as an underlying organizational tool are all utilized. Vignelli and Bierut neatly arranged the bulk of the text into three columns near the title, leaving the rest of the space to be filled with a jumble of oversized letterforms, reminiscent of crumbling bricks, suggestive, perhaps, of the breaking down of two disciplines that was the convention’s theme that year: “Art in Architecture.”

Poster, IDCNY Welcomes the 1988 AIA Convention; Designed by Massimo Vignelli (Italian, active USA, 1931–2014); USA; off-set lithograph on white wove paper; Sheet: 81.3 x 45.7 cm (32 x 18 in.); Gift of Lella and Massimo Vignelli; 2009-42-15