Featuring Lella and Massimo Vignelli. Rating unavailable.

Where does all the beautiful stuff in our lives come from? You know, the elegantly crafted pens, cups, book covers, jewellery, buildings, and furniture that fill up our material world. A surprising amount comes from Massimo and Lella Vignelli, married Italians who moved to the United States in 1966 and immediately put their stamp on its visual culture.

They came up with indelible branding for early clients like Ford and American Airlines, and their 1972 map and signage system for the New York City subway system has been enjoyed and employed by many millions. The latter is currently being revamped by the designing couple—an occasion for this rather haphazardly assembled look at the Vignellis’ ultraprolific career, which has encompassed everything from church architecture to books, clothing, and plastic dinnerware.

Codirectors Roberto Guerra and Kathy Brew in no way match their subjects’ aesthetic of rich simplicity. In this high-tech era, you can make a stunning HD study of virtually anything. In fact, there’s already one—the award-winning Helvetica (yet to arrive here on the big screen, sadly)—about the Swiss typeface that Massimo popularized through his graphic work. Here, Guerra simply sticks his handheld camera, very close and grainy, in his subjects’ faces, sometimes letting them flounder and repeat themselves. (Massimo works for immortality, the frantically laughing Lella—the architect of the duo—lives to tease her husband, it seems.)

Slapdash interviews with design tyros like Richard Heller and Milton Glaser confirm that the Vignellis have restricted themselves to a rather narrow vocabulary of typography and colour, getting variety out of materials instead. The 75-minute film makes that case well, but there’s no discussion of what their monomania has cost them creatively, or where they sit in today’s pantheon. The film ends with the opening of their archive at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which could have triggered a thoughtful tour of their work. It doesn’t.