Inspiring Design Quotes

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To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams. —Giorgio de Chirico “Art is creativity, creativity is passion, passion is love.” —Andrew Brynjulson A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create. —Kasimir Malevich The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. —Michelangelo When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art. Marc Chagall All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. —Eckhart Tolle

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Transcript of Inspiring Design Quotes

Page 1: Inspiring Design Quotes

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic

and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken,

it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.

—Giorgio de Chirico

“Art is creativity, creativity is passion, passion is love.” —Andrew Brynjulson

A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he

creates new appearances of things.

—Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most

ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create.

—Kasimir Malevich

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

—Michelangelo

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree

or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

—Marc Chagall

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. —Eckhart Tolle

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

—Andrew Wyeth

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A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on to canvas what is in

front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing.

—William Dobell

There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it. —Henry Moore

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. —John Ruskin

Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.

—Picasso

An artist is not paid for his labour but for his vision.

 —James MacNeill Whistler

Beginning with audacity is a very great part of the art of painting.

—Winston Churchill

I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them.

—Picasso

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. —Picasso

 

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.

—Henry Ward Beecher

Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace

and hope, will keep them company to the end of the day.

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—Winston Churchill

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place:

from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape,

from a spider's web.

—Picasso

Do not worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to.

—Robert Henri

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a

part of the main.

—John Donne.

”An artist's early work is inevitably made up of a mixture of tendencies and interests,

some of which are compatible and some of which are in conflict. As the artist picks

his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry

emerge. His failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he

conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something

else is.

—Bridget Riley

Even at best talent remains a constant, and those who rely upon that gift

alone, without developing further, peak quickly and soon fade to obscurity.

—David Bayles and Ted Orland.

The seed of your next art work lies embedded in the imperfections of your

current piece. Such imperfections (or mistakes, if you’re feeling particularly

depressed about them today) are your guides - valuable, reliable, objective,

non-judgemental guides - to matters you need to reconsider or develop

further.

—David Bayles and Ted Orland.

Quotes on Architecture

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Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by

man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power,

and pleasure.

—John Ruskin

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart. —Frank Lloyd Wright

Architecture is frozen music.

—Goethe

The architect must not only understand drawing, but music.

—Vitruvius Pollio

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization. —Frank Lloyd Wright

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the

most surely, on the soul

—Ernest Dimnet

 

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it

begins.

—Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the

light.

—Le Corbusier

There are a great many things about architecture that are hidden from the untrained

eye.

—Frank Gehry

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that

contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

—Philip Johnson

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There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can

walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through

—Dan Rice

Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.

—Spiro Kostof

An architect is the drawer of dreams

—Grace McGarvie

Architecture is not all about the design of the building and nothing else, it is also

about the cultural setting and the ambience, the whole affair.

—Michael Graves

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

—Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

This building is like a book. Its architecture is the binding, its text is in the glass and

sculpture.

—Malcolm Miller

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole. —Maya Lin

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men,

to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of

things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of

reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order.

—Frank Lloyd Wright

Quotes on Design

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I think design covers so much more than the aesthetic. Design is

fundamentally more. Design is usability. It is Information Architecture. It is

Accessibility. This is all design.

—Mark Boulton

Design is the search for a magical balance between business and art; art and craft;

intuition and reason; concept and detail; playfulness and formality; client and

designer; designer and printer; and printer and public.

— Valerie Pettis

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing

itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

— Steve Jobs

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a

particular purpose.

— Charles Eames

   

A well-designed text will seem weightless after a time; the initial feel of the book

fades away as the mind becomes engrossed in the words.

— Mandy Brown

   

Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

— Orson Welles

Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should always say, “Look at this.” — David Craib

   

Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.

—Brian Reed

   

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.

— Joe Sparano

    The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong. — Marty Neumeier

   

Design is where science and art break even.

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— Robin Mathew

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.

— Bruno Munari

Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea

wasn’t theirs.

— Frank Chimero

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in

a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a

city plan.

— Eliel Saarinen

Bad design is smoke, while good design is a mirror.

— Juan-Carlos Fernàndez

   

Don’t design for everyone. It’s impossible. All you end up doing is designing

something that makes everyone unhappy.

— Leisa Reichelt

   

The design process, at its best, integrates the aspirations of art, science,

and culture.

— Jeff Smith

   

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

— Jeffrey Zeldman

Design is not the narrow application of formal skills, it is a way of thinking.

— Chris Pullman

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.  —Joseph Chilton Pearce

Graphic design is the spit and polish but not the shoe.

—Ellen Lupton

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

—Leonardo Da Vinci

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.

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— Nolan Bushnell

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the

necessary may speak.

— Hans Hofmann

Simplicity, carried to an an extreme, becomes elegance. — Jon Franklin

Design is about making things good (and then better) and right (and fantastic) for the

people who use and encounter them.

— Matt Beale

I’m convinced that without bad design, the world would be a far less stimulating

place; we would have nothing to marvel over and nothing to be nostalgic about.

— Carrie Phillips Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all. Everyone makes design decisions all the time without realizing it—like Moliere’s M. Jourdain who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life—and good design is simply the result of making these decisions consciously, at the right stage, and in consultation with others as the need arises. — Douglas Martin

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

— Victor Papanek

Art is an idea that has found its perfect visual expression. And design is the vehicle

by which this expression is made possible. Art is a noun, and design is a noun and

also a verb. Art is a product and design is a process. Design is the foundation of

all the arts.

— Paul Rand

Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of

craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.

— Erik Adigard

Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.

— Robert L. Peters

   

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It’s art if can’t be explained.

It’s fashion if no one asks for an explanation.

It’s design if it doesn’t need explanation.

— Wouter Stokkel

A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is. — Leo Frankowski

A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.

— Brenda Laurel

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint Exupéry

To say that something is designed means it has intentions that go beyond

its function. Otherwise it’s just planning.

— Ayse Birsel

No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the

people for whom the object is intended.

— Adrian Forty

The designer is a visually literate person, just as an editor is expected by training and

inclination to be versed in language and literature, but to call the former an artist by

occupation is as absurd as to refer to the latter as a poet.

— Douglas Martin

To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.

— Milton Glaser

If there were a prerequisite for the future successful digital creative, it

would be the passion for discovery.

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— John Maeda

Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era - it's a process that

creates order out of chaos, that renders technology usable to business. Design

means being good, not just looking good.

— Clement Mok

Only when the design fails does it draw attention to itself; when it succeeds, it’s invisible.

— John D. Berry

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which

ones to keep.

— Scott Adams

 

There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.

— Milton Glaser

Design is the contrast of the core of limitations therefore there are no

boundaries. It is simply an interpretation of creativity.

— Jenaiha Woods

Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone

comes near it in obstinacy.

— Jan Tschichold

Designers may be the true intellectuals of the future.

— Paola Antonelli

The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor

fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what

we try to do is cure it somehow with design.

— Massimo Vignelli

Great design is all about details. With innovative material selection,

sensible construction techniques and modern aesthetics one can craft a

unique design language that sets a new standard.

— Roi James

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Visual organization is the deliberate prioritization of meaning within a

visual design. It’s the process of applying the principles behind perception -

how we make sense of what we see - to illuminate relationships between

content and actions.

— Luke Wroblewski

The original idea makes design distinctive, function makes it work and

quality adds value.

— Serge Zuev

Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the

importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form.

— John Maeda

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

— Steve Jobs

 

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or

fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books,

paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations,

architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and

shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If

you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is

invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your

thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it.

— Jim Jarmusch

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success

when they gave up.

—Thomas Edison

Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest

expectations.

—Paul Rand

People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance

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attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.

— Paola Antonelli

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.

— Charles Eames

Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.

— Brian Reed

There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.

— Massimo Vignelli

People ignore design that ignores people.

— Frank Chimero

I’ve always held to the belief that the practice of creating compelling graphic

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design occurs not by employing the principals of a democracy, but rather, that of a monarchy.

— Thomas Vasquez

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.

— Joe Sparano

Every designers’ dirty little secret is that they copy other designers’ work. They see work they like, and they imitate it. Rather cheekily, they call this inspiration.

— Aaron Russell

The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong.

— Marty Neumeier

Visual design is often the polar opposite of engineering: trading hard edges for subjective decisions based on gut feelings and personal experiences. It’s messy, unpredictable, and notoriously hard to measure. The apparently erratic behavior of artists drives engineers bananas. Their decisions seem arbitrary and risk everything with no guaranteed benefit.

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— Scott Stevenson

Design is where science and art break even.

— Robin Mathew

Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere.

— Mieke Gerritzen

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.

— Bruno Munari

Design is the application of intent - the opposite of happenstance, and an antidote to accident.

— Robert L. Peters

Design is the search for a magical balance between business and art; art and craft; intuition and reason; concept and detail; playfulness and formality; client and designer; designer and printer; and printer and public.

— Valerie Pettis

Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should always say, “Look at this.”

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— David Craib

Bad design is smoke, while good design is a mirror.

— Juan-Carlos Fernàndez

Don’t design for everyone. It’s impossible. All you end up doing is designing something that makes everyone unhappy.

— Leisa Reichelt

Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.

— Ellen Lupton

The design process, at its best, integrates the aspirations of art, science, and culture.

— Jeff Smith

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

— Edward Tufte

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Design is intelligence made visible.

— Alina Wheeler

Math is easy; design is hard.— Jeffrey Veen

Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order.

— Victor Papanek

Design trends online change more often than the wind, and slightly less often than my socks.

— Suleiman Leadbitter

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

— Jeffrey Zeldman

People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.

— Paola Antonelli

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Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.

— Tate Linden

Design is not the narrow application of formal skills, it is a way of thinking.

— Chris Pullman

Designers are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

— Fabien Barral

Design is about making things good (and then better) and right (and fantastic) for the people who use and encounter them.

— Matt Beale

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

— Steve Jobs

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I’m convinced that without bad design, the world would be a far less stimulating place; we would have nothing to marvel over and nothing to be nostalgic about.

— Carrie Phillips

Behavioral design is all about feeling in control. Includes: usability, understanding, but also the feel.

— Don Norman

Good design must be defined by appropriateness to audience and goals, and by its effectiveness, not by its adherence to Swiss design or the number of awards it wins.

— Drew Davies

Being a famous designer is like being a famous dentist.

— Noreen Morioka

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Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.

— Robert L. Peters

It’s art if can’t be explained.It’s fashion if no one asks for an explanation.It’s design if it doesn’t need explanation.

— Wouter Stokkel

You can’t do better design with a computer, but you can speed up your work enormously.

— Wim Crouwel

I love the comment, “You must love designing for a living.” At that point I usually start to laugh or break into uncontrollable tears.

— Andrew Lewis

The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to

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understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.

— Tom Peters

Designers have a dual duty; contractually to their clients and morally to the later users and recipients of their work.

— Hans Höger

Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.

— Milton Glaser

I find modernist design boring, but it so much faster!

— Christine Suewon Lee

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

— Douglas Adams

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

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— Sir Alec Issigonis

A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is.

— Leo Frankowski

For me, design is like choosing what I’m going to wear for the day - only much more complicated and not really the same at all.

— Robynne Raye

Design is a means toward accomplishing the end goals of serving markets and generating profits. Furthermore, design is an element in social responsibility. Good design allows “form to complement performance.” The way things look is not irrelevant to the way things work: how they work is how they should look.

— Thomas F. Schutte

Art is like masturbation. It is selfish and introverted and done for you and you alone. Design is like sex. There is someone else involved, their needs are just as important as your own, and if everything goes right, both parties are happy in the end.

— Colin Wright

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Many desperate acts of design (including gradients, drop shadows, and the gratuitous use of transparency) are perpetuated in the absence of a strong concept. A good idea provides a framework for design decisions, guiding the work.

— Noreen Morioka

I would show my my jobs to my mother, and she would always say the same thing: “That’s nice dear.” And then she would say, “Did you write it?” or “Did you do the drawing?” or “Did you take the pictures?” I’d always answer “no,” then I realized the problem. My answer was then, “I made this happen. It’s called design.”

— Brian Webb

Most [clients] expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.

— Dan Brown

Technology over technique produces emotionless design.

— Daniel Mall

I think design covers so much more than the aesthetic. Design is

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fundamentally more. Design is usability. It is Information Architecture. It is Accessibility. This is all design.

— Mark Boulton

A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.

— Brenda Laurel/p>

The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.

— Massimo Vignelli

If design isn’t profitable, then it’s art.

— Henrik Fiskar

Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea wasn’t theirs.

— Frank Chimero

A well-designed text will seem weightless after a time; the initial feel of the book fades away as the mind becomes engrossed in the words.

— Mandy Brown

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Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does.

— David Carson

The difference between a Designer and Developer, when it comes to design skills, is the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.

— Scott Hanselman

Practice safe design: Use a concept.

— Petrula Vrontikis

Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

— Orson Welles

Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.

— Raymond Loewy

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

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— Eliel Saarinen

Truly elegant design incorporates top-notch functionality into a simple, uncluttered form.

— David Lewis

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.

— Chris Bangle

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

— Steve Jobs

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At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism.

— Erik Adigard

To say that something is designed means it has intentions that go beyond its function. Otherwise it’s just planning.

— Ayse Birsel

— Ivan Chermayeff

No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended.

— Adrian Forty

Many things difficult to design prove easy to perform.

— Samuel Johnson

The designer is a visually literate person, just as an editor is expected by training and inclination to be versed in language and literature, but to call the former an artist by

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occupation is as absurd as to refer to the latter as a poet.

— Douglas Martin

Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all. Everyone makes design decisions all the time without realizing it—like Moliere’s M. Jourdain who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life—and good design is simply the result of making these decisions consciously, at the right stage, and in consultation with others as the need arises.

— Douglas Martin

Design is easy. All you do is stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead.

— Marty Neumeier

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

— Victor Papanek

Our opportunity, as designers, is to learn how to handle the complexity, rather than shy away from it, and to realize that the big art of design is to make complicated things simple.

— Tim Parsey

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The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. He new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.

— Paul Rand

Art is an idea that has found its perfect visual expression. And design is the vehicle by which this expression is made possible. Art is a noun, and design is a noun and also a verb. Art is a product and design is a process. Design is the foundation of all the arts.

— Paul Rand

Designing a product is designing a relationship.

— Steve Rogers

It is easy to fail when designing an interactive experience. Designers fail when they do not know the audience, integrate the threads of content and context, welcome the public properly, or make clear what the experience is and what the audience’s role in it will be.

— Edwin Schlossberg

Good design is good business.— Thomas J. Watson Jr.

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Great design will not sell an inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential.

— Thomas J. Watson Jr.

…designers can make life more bearable by producing stuff that touches its audience rather than fucks them in the head.

— Jon Wozencraft

Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.

— Erik Adigard

I never design a building before I’ve seen the site and met the people who will be using it.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

The fundamental failure of most graphic, product, architectural, and even urban design is its insistence on serving the God of Looking-Good rather than the God of Being-Good.

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— Richard Saul Wurman

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Design is a response to social change.George Nelson

Design is art optimized to meet objectives.Shimon Shmueli, Founder of Touch360

Design is a form of competitive advantage. People tend to think of design as good art, good visual language, which it absolutely has to be. But it’s also about the ability to do systems thinking.James P. Hackett, President and CEO, Steelase

Design is not a plan for decoration.Brian Collins, Executive Creative Director, Brand Integration Group, Ogilvy & Mather

Design, in the end, is about creating better things for people. Along the way, it can generate better profits as well.Bruce Nussbaum, Editorial Page Editor, Business Week

Design is everything. Everything!Paul Rand, Graphic Design Pioneer and Educator

Design is an integrative process that seeks resolution (not compromise) through cross-disciplinary teamwork. Design is intentional. Success by design simply means prospering on purpose.Michael Smythe, Partner, Creationz Consultants

Design—in terms of thinking and process—is the champion of the future, envisaging and interpreting insights and ideas through strategy, ideas, products, spaces and communications.Peter Haythornthwaite, Principal, creativelab

Design is redesign.  |  EssayJan Michl, Professor, Oslo School of Architecture, Norway

Design is people.Jane Jacobs, Urbanist

[A designer is] an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective

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economist and evolutionary strategist.Buckminster Fuller

The habit of calling a finished product a Design is convenient but wrong. Design is what you do, not what you've done.Bruce Archer, The Guardian

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

Design is challenge-solving.Aaron Marcus, User Interface Designer, Founder and President, Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A)

Design is more than meets the eye. Design is about communicating benefits. Design is not about designers. Design is not an ocean it's a fishbowl. Design is creating something you believe in.Chuck Green, Principal, Logic Arts Corporation

Design is a field of concern, response, and enquiry as often as decision and consequence... it is convenient to group [design] into three simple categories, though the distinctions are in no way absolute, nor are they always so described: product design (things), environment design (places) and communication design (messages).Norman Potter, an english furniture and environmental designer (from his book "What is a Designer?" from HyphenPress) Design is the patterning and planning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end... any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself works, counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life.Victor Papanek, industrial designer (from his book "Design for the Real World") Design is the intentional and altruistic act of sythnesizing a harmonious response to a context. It is neither art, which embeds self, or science, which proclaims problem-solving.Hanee Patenaude, Interdisciplinary Designer The designer... has a passion for doing something that fits somebody’s needs, but that is not just a simple fix. The designer has a dream that goes beyond what exists, rather than fixing what exists... the designer wants to create a solution

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that fits in a deeper situational or social sense.David Kelley, Founder of IDEO (from Terry Winograd’s book “Bringing Design to Software”) What is design?... It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds—the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes—and you try to bring the two together.Mitchell Kapor, software designer (from his book “Bringing design to software”)

For me, the concept of design is more than object-oriented; it encompasses the design of processes, systems and institutions as well. Increasingly, we need to think about designing the types of institutions we need to get things done in this rapidly accelerating world.John Seely Brown, Chief Scientist, Xerox Corporation

Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.Erik Adigard

Design is a choice.Davis Furniture advertisement

Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.Walter Gropius, Architect and Founder, Bauhaus (building house)

Design is art that makes itself useful.1984 poster for Die Neue Sammlung, design museum, Munich

Design is a learning experience. So my agenda is to figure out what I want to learn next.Ayse Birsel, Industrial Designer and President, Olive1:1

To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.Milton Glaser, Graphic Designer

Design is the term we use to describe both the process and the result of giving tangible form to human ideas. Design doesn’t just contribute to the quality of life; design, in many ways, now constitutes the quality of life.

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Peter Lawrence, Founder, Corporate Design Foundation

Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.Aaron Betsky, Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects, SFMOMA

Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.Louis Kahn, Architect

Design is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human problems by identifying them, examining alternate solutions to them, choosing and executing the best solution.Ivan Chermayeff, Graphic Designer, Founder, Chermayeff & Geismar Inc.

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.Steve Jobs, Founder and CEO, Apple

The essential function of the (design) profession in our society is to enhance and cultivate communications toward: Easier understanding of ideas and complex problems, in the shortest possible time and higher visual and auditory retention of data.Will Burtin, Graphic Designer

Design is the fundamental creative activity with which we direct our lives, and collectively, the earth’s transformation from its original, natural state into our human-made world.Michael Shannon

With function, flow, and form as basis, design is evaluated as a process culminating in an entity which intensifies comprehension.Ladislav Sutnar, Graphic Designer

Design shapes the way we live. So it ought to serve everyone.Eva Maddox, Interior Architect and Designer, Co-founder, Archeworks

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Design is... above all an effort to improve reality... I always try to begin with considerations of its function... I ask myself, who needs it, which materials best suit its functions and so on...Gianfranco Frattini, Industrial Designer

Designing is not a profession but an attitude. Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is the intergration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. Thinking in relationships.Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Photographer, Graphic Designer, Co-Founder, Bauhaus

For design is about the making of things: things that are memorable and have presence in the world of the mind. It makes demand upon our ability both to consolidate information as knowledge and to deploy it imaginatively to creative purpose in the pursuit of fresh in formation.Krome Barratt, Logic & Design In Art, Science & Mathmatics

Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era—it’s a process that creates order out of chaos, that renders technology usable to business. Design means being good, not just looking good. Clement Mok, Design Business: Multiple Media, Multiple Disciplines

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.Christopher Alexander

Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space... On the one hand it’s about shelter, but it’s also about pleasure. The intention is to really carve out of a city civic spaces and the more it is accessible to a much larger mass in public and it’s about people enjoying that space. That makes life that much better. If you think about housing, education, whether schools and hospitals, these are all very interesting projects because in the way you interpret this special experience.

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Zaha Hadid, Architect

Design is communication. Great design is rational. Rational design is filtered communication.Thierry Loa, Web Designer, Director, Programmer, Producer

The details are not the details. They make the design.Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

Now architecture consists of order, which in Greek is called taxis ... Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and, as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result.Vitruvius

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.Louis Kahn

A man-made thing that produces pleasure (and criticism) by somehow taping into the order of the universe is beautiful. Making beautiful things makes our lives worthwhile. My teacher, and one of the founders of the Pratt industrial design program, Rowena Reed Kostellow, said, "Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization." From a pragmatic point of view, for something to be beautiful, it has to work. In order to make this idea clearer I have combined the ideas of beauty and function into one word: Beautility.Tucker Viemeister

Design is more about observing the world around you, then about personal creativity.Cam Shaw   

  on design advice   Design that moves others comes from issues that move you.Jennifer Morla, Principal, Morla Design

Make it like a sunflower.Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple, to Johnathan Ive, Vice President of Design, Apple, on previous

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version of iMac

I’m not a believer in putting designers off in an ivory tower. They need to have a voice at the table so they can identify where and why design can make a difference. We also need to understand the business issues. If we don't make our numbers this quarter, we don't earn the right to do something [cool] the next time.Chuck Jones, Vice President of Global Consumer Design, Whirlpool

Most people think of eco-compatibility in terms of recycling. But even with recycling, the earth's resources aren't nearly sufficient to allow the bulk of the planet’s population to consume at the levels we do in the developed world. If we are ever to allow the entire population to reach our standard of living, we have to learn to make do with less.Gabriele Centazzo, Founder and Designer, Valcucine

Sometimes my ideas do cross boundaries into other media. But you can’t ever force it.J. Meejin Yoon, Architect, Sculptor and MIT Professor

All of the environment should express a higher, more-ordered, broadly-complete dedication to the well-designed.John Massey, Graphic Design Pioneer and Educator

What works good is better than what looks good. Because what works good lasts.Ray Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act. When people feel they had to express themselves for originality for its own sake, that tends not to be creativity. Only when you get into the problem and the problem becomes clear, can creativity take over.Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need.Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

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Who ever said that pleasure wasn’t functional?Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker, Asked whether he design for pleasure or function?

Good ideas come from everywhere. It’s more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.Jeanne Gang, Architect, Studio Gang/O'Donnell

To creat one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.Georgia O'Keefe, Painter

Something that shapes our work as designers is personal experience. In my life I experience tremendous change, moving from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, from one person to the next, from advertising to design, my roles change every minute of the day. This minute I'm a friend, next minute I'll be a son. I can be an employer or an employee at the same time. Human experiences are multidimensional, and in my work I would like to reflect that.Tung Chiang, Principal, Ah Tung Design

Our challenges for the future are the same as they have always been: Will our talents be used to divide or unite? For peace or for war? To replenish or deplete? Design brings emotion to a message. It takes an intellectual concept from the head into the heart. It is a powerful tool and, sadly, too often, a powerful weapon. As designers, we have incredible influence in shaping our cultural attitudes. We need to be more accountable for the selfish ways we use resources.Joshua Chen, Founder and Creative Director, Chen Design Associates

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.Joan Miro, Painter

Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don't hesitate to make it beautiful.Shaker lesson

Architecture has to be greater than just architecture. It has to address social values, as well as technical and aesthetic values. On top of that, the one true gift that an architect has is his or her imagination. We take something ordinary and elevate it to something extraordinary.Samuel Mockbee, Professor of Architecture,

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Auburn University

I have no recipe for how to combine things. But you must be sincere. And if you are, strangely, it will succeed.Andree Putnam, Interior Designer

If the client is a vacuum, you’re not going to get great architecture, you’re just going to get whatever you want to do. Great architecture requires debate and challenge. Think about Michelangelo and Pope Julius—they didn't get along that well!Ed Feiner, Chief Architect, General Services Administration

Simplicity and repose are qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.Eliel Saarinen, Architect

The more that a person brings to design, the better his or her ability to communicate.Michael Vanderbyl, Dean, California College of Arts and Crafts

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.Douglas Adams, Novelist

Something must have form to be seen but must make sense to be understood and used.Klaus Krippendorff, Design Educator and Author

Be culturally literate, because if you don’t have any understanding of the world you live in and the culture you live in, you’re not going to express anything to anybody else.Paula Scher, Graphic Designer, Pentagram

You have to be interested in culture to design for it.Lorraine Wild, Graphic Designer

Fuck design, let’s dance.Andre Toet

Recognizing the need is the primary condition

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for design.Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.Douglas Adams

We’re not trained to think about time in a systematic way, as a design dimension. But it’s everything to the circadian system because it matters when you give users the light, not just whether it’s blue or white. Design professionals are not real comfortable with thinking in the temporal dimension yet.Mariana Figueiro, Architect, Lighting Research Center

Before you can execute the design, you’ve got to live the design problem.Credited to Kathleen Brandenburg, Principal and Cofounder, IA Collaborative

The designer has an obligation to provide an appropriate conceptual model for the way that the device works. It doesn't have to completely accurate but it has to be sufficiently accurate that it will help in both the learning of the operation and also dealing with novel situations.Don Norman, Interview by Avi Parush, Carlton University

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.Walt Disney

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.Daniel Libeskind, Architect

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.Le Corbusier, Architect

A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities.Walter Gropius, Architect       

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  on design and business

  I’ve been in this business for almost 30 years, and it’s always been functionally organized. So where does design go? We want to design the purchasing experience—what we call the “first moment of truth”; we want to design every component of the product; and we want to design the communication experience and the user experience. I mean, it’s all design. And I think that’s been hard for people to come to grips with. I don’t think anybody thinks we’re not seriously in the design business. But it has taken time. Remember that one of the disciples had to put his hand in the bloody wounds to believe. We have some businesses that are doubting Thomases. We have other businesses that couldn’t wait. Some got into it in a reasonably disciplined and strategic way with good results. Others sort of leaped into the middle of the lake and are having problems trying to go too fast. There are so many little things that can be so much better. The consumer can articulate what she doesn’t like about [a product] sometimes, but she can almost never articulate what you need to do to remove the dissastisfier or to create delight. That's what we have to work on.A.G. Lafley, CEO, Procter & Gamble

For a long time companies that wanted to shrink went to consultants for help. Consulting groups did a pretty good job in helping them. But the people who can tell you how to shrink are not the people who can tell you how to grow. They may be good at helping you to control the number but not at helping you to expand and create new ideas. For top-line growth, you have to sell something. For that you need design. Design innovation will provide the new products. Designers can tell you how to grow, how to innovate, how to change your culture.Bruce Nussbaum, Editorial Page Editor, Business Week

Coming from marketing design's kind of gone from a peripheral whatever to something I intellectually understood. But working this way has taken me... to a visceral understanding.Claudia Kotchka, Vice President for Design Innovation and Stategy, Procter & Gamble

My whole theory on authenticity is that there is a triangle: consumer, manufacturer, and designer. If there’s no consumer, there’s no market and therefore no reason to knock off creative property. If

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there’s no manufacturer, there’s no production run: You own a one-off Nakashima table, which is beautiful, but not what people like the Eameses, who designed for mass production, were after. Now, what happens if there’s no designer in the triangle?Eames Demetrios (grandson of Charles Eames), Principal, Eames Office

(Design is) the bridge that brings the business strategy to life. It can build intangible brand value for a business, so the business is worth more. We all know that the intangible brand value of Coke far outweighs the value of its tangible assets.Geoff Suvalko, Creative Director and Partner, DesignWorksEIG

Design, in terms of its relationship with business, should be seen as part of the business model. It should be understood and embraced by the company in general, and most certainly at Board level. From my perspective, I’m not interested in companies unless they have a strong attitude regarding the meaningfulness of their products in society. Ideally, a company will have a strong design-led ideology, because these are the companies—in my experience—that really have passion and integrity, and therefore perform.Mark Pennington, Director and retained Consultant Designer, Formway Furniture

Design is the go-between. It is the interpreter of the intentions and ambitions of an organisation and the desires and needs (often hitherto unexposed) of the end user/recipient. Frequently companies have sound ideas, but they don’t have the skills or experience—the creative wherewithal—to convert them into products and or services that are unique, prized and profitable.Peter Haythornthwaite, Principal, creativelab product and graphic design consultancy, Auckland

Design is that competitive advantage that sets a company apart in the global market. Within the global economy, the highest performing companies see design as a strategic asset. It becomes the core to their businesses. For those companies, design is more than aesthetics—it’s competitive intellectual property.Monika Conway, Founder and Creative

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Director, Chalk Designstudio

It is not enough to have a talented designer; the management must be inspired too. The creative process is very disorganised; the production process has to be very rational.Bernard Arnault, Chairman and Owner, LVMH

The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life.Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

There are three basic principles behind any well-designed product: truth, humanity, and simplicity.Sohrab Vossoughi, Founder and President, Ziba Design Inc.

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.Thomas Watson, Jr., IBM

Good design is good business.Thomas Watson, Jr., IBM

Designer's derive their rewards from ‘inner standards of excellence, from the intrinsic satisfaction of their tasks. They are committed to the task, not the job. To their standards, not their boss.’ So whereas most people divide their lives between time spent earning money and time spent spending it, designers generally lead a seamless existence in which work and play are synonymous. As Milanese designer Richard Sapper put it: ‘I never work—all the time.’Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, and Alan Fletcher

Design has allowed us to stand out; to look different and show that difference boldy.Joe Mansueto, Founder and Chairman, Morningstar

It’s important that design gets ‘cooked’ into the product at the start, whether you're talking about software, office space, or a web design. It's not an afterthought.Alan Webber, Founder, Fast Company magazine

The most common misperception is the word ‘design’. People think of primarily pretty pictures or

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forms. They don't understand the depth to which design goes—not only in products, but in every aspect of our life. Whether it is the design of a program, a product or some form of communication, we are living in a world that’s totally designed. Somebody made a decision about everything. And it was a design decision.Sam Farber, Founder, Copco cookware, OXO kitchen tools, WOVO serveware

Design can be both a manifestation of a company’s design ethic and an outward communication of a company’s design ethic and drive for excellence.Robert A. Lutz, Vice Chairman, Chrysler

Design acknowledges change. Its meaning encompasses change in our times. To design is to ‘create order and to function according to a plan.’ The notion of change and design move along the same path.Sara Little Turnbull, Director, Process of Change, Innovation and Design Laboratory, Stanford's Graduate School of Business

Design must seduce, shape, and perhaps more importantly, evoke an emotional response.April Greiman    

 

on design and client relations

 

I wouldn’t call it a retail store. It’s a place where culture and commerce intersect. It's more like the Silk Road—a sense of exploration mixed with the exchange of things and ideas.Ron Pompei, Architect, on his design of the Anthropologie space

Each client is a partnership, a conversation. You’re only going to be able to go as far as they wish to go, in a way. ... That makes all the difference.Lindy Roy, Architect    

  on designand education

  The principle is that learning happens in all kinds of ways: through interacting with your peers, in formal classroom settings, and even ... when you’re teaching others.From the article To Be Continued... by Aric Chen and Jonathan Ringen

We have to create an atmosphere and a space where students and teachers can do their most creative work. I compare it to being a film producer

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instead of a director. ... You produce a body of work ... by putting people, ingredients and stories together to make things happen. Education is invisible really. So you have to make certain intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual investments.Toshiko Mori, Architect

We believe that designers are professional comforters who bring relief. But we also believe that designers can be professional educators who teach prevention.Chris Chen, Instructor, Art Institute of Colorado

Teachers of design should help a student to find their own voice. In other words, not be a templated version of the teacher, but rather to help them [the students] unfold what they already know and can bring to the table.April Greiman, Graphic Designer and Educator    

  on designand society

  There is so much blandness and grayness out there, people want to be able to say “it’s mine.” They want to customize their cars like they customize a jeans jacket.Neil Gershenfeld, Professor, M.I.T.

The essential element in design is always beauty. This is true in nature, in the architecture of trees. Trees invent a way to coexist and survive with other organisms through beauty.Gabriele Centazzo, Founder and Designer, Valcucine

The body shape is a perfect small-scale exercise in spatial design, a testing ground for ideas and techniques to apply to buildings. Openings, folds, panelizing, pattern-making—the concepts and problems are much the same, whether it's a sleeve or a curtain wall.Elena Manferdini, Architect

There’s no reason for unhappiness if you’re living with nice design.Isaac Mizrahi, Fashion Designer

I feel quite oppressed by the furniture we have.Matali Crasset, Designer

A lot of designers treat design as a route to stardom

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or a form of contemporary art. I am not anti those things, but how people use the thing is just as important.Tom Dixon, Creative Director, Habitat

Architecture is an imposed art in some ways, imposed upon the public, so people must be sure about what you’re doing. You have to be sure about what you’re doing.Renzo Piano, Architect

The new “stars” are nothing like the old masters of design. Whereas Loewy, Earl, Rams, Sottsass, and Sapper first delivered the goods, then became celebrities, today’s so-called stars have mastered the art of selling personae rather than groundbreaking ideas. The focus has moved from mass-produced objects to boutique work.Gadi Amit, newdealdesign, LLC

As we move into the 21st century, it becomes ever clearer that the ultimate, most intimate territory for design is not electronics, or interiors, or furniture, or the Web. It’s us—our own living, breathing, biological selves. ... the personal makeover has become our most fundamental design task.Rick Poynor, Design Writer

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.William Butler Yeats    

  on designand practice

  Traditions change. My grandmother would never have eaten soup out of a bowl; she would have insisted on a soup plate. Today we’re more tolerant. If I change the shape of an object and it makes someone happy, that’s reason enough.Alfredo Häberli, Designer, Responding to Why design another wineglass, another service set? Aren't there enough out there already?

When people say they don’t understand design, it’s because they don’t get involved in the process.Tom Dair, Smart Design

Architecture is not created by individuals. The genius sketch ... is a myth. Architecture is made by a team of committed people who work together, and in fact, success usually has more to do with dumb determination than with

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genius.Joshua Prince-Ramus, Partner, Office for Metropolitan Architecture

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.Antoinè De Saint-Exupéry

One of the main criteria for the design of the everyday, though, is sensuality. Something that is sensual evokes a response that's not just visual or intellectual: It’s suggestive.Deborah Berke, Principal, Deborah Berke Architect PC

Design works if it’s authentic, inspired, and has a clear point of view. It can’t be a collection of input.Ron Johnson, Senior Vice President of Retail, Apple

We’re asking architecture to take care of mixing people of different races and incomes who normally sort themselves out; we’re asking it to do a lot. Our job is to make livable environments, but we can’t erase racism by the way we design a building.Roberta Feldman, Professor, School of Architecture, University of Illinois Chicago

Too often we don’t question whether celebrity status in design is a reward for good work. The combination of a well-known manufacturer and a big-name designer leads us to believe that a new product's utility has been well resolved. Whether you like it is, finally, an issue of taste.Tony Whitfield, Designer, Chair, Product Design Department, Parsons School of Design, New York

If you want to push design into new areas, you have to work closely across the boundaries of people’s trades and professions. If you know the questions to ask, you can pull out the expertise.Jeanne Gang, Architect, Studio Gang/O'Donnell

Designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organizing and manipulating of words and pictures.Jeffery Veen, The Art and Science of Web Design

Making a system easier to use for someone does

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not, for me, make that system better. You bring a ‘user experience’ to life by designing with people, not for them. Users create knowledge, but only if we let them.John Thackara, Doors of Perception

The idea that you make an experience that requires a conversation in a public place is training for the fact that culture is collective.Edwin Schlossberg, ESI

Given the rising need for responsive and humane environments, architects’ tendency for self-expression cold result in the disintegration of the profession altogether, unless we rethink our role. T.S. Eliot urged poets to serve poetry by illustrating the capabilities of verse instead of their own personas. If places are to communicate fully through architecture, the architect must fade into the medium. Can we be selfless enough to silence our own voices?Lance Hosey, Metropolis magazine

Architects are taught to privilege the visual and be seduced by images. But we live in all five of our senses.Hillary Brown, Architect, Office of Sustainable Design

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.Frank Gehry

I design for real people. I think of our customers all the time. There is no virtue whatsoever in creating clothing or accessories that are not practical.Giorgio Armani

A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.Antoine de St-Expurey

There is no such thing as a boring project. There are only boring executions.Irene Etzkorn

A spaceship is a delicately balanced environment. Every element taht doesn’t contribute to the overall functioning of the system is by definition working against it. The same is true of our plant—our mothership—though sadly, most architecture today is

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slowly fatal to nature’s systems.Constance Adams, Architect, NASA

There’s nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.Ansel Adams, Photographer

The task of the architectural project is to reveal, through the transformation of form, the essence of the surrounding context.V. Gregotti

You explore concepts and things that interest you, but you are also exploring inside of yourself. Ed Paschke, Painter 

 

on designand technology

 

Interactive designers spend most of their time with who aren‘t at all like them: technologists, information architects, strategists, producers and others. Promoting communication among these individuals is paramount, as is educating decision-makers in corporate and management positions about what interactive design is, and what it can do for business.Katherine Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, eDesign magazine

Computers are stupid.Pablo Picasso

Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.Milton Glaser, Graphic Designer

You’re as sensual as a pencil.Frank N. Furter, The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.Dorothea Lange    

  on good design   Great design isn't just what looks cool, it's a calculated and balanced blend of form and function that serves a specific purpose. Although, it's really satisfying when the end result looks cool.

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William Justice, Web Designer

Good design allows things to operate more efficiently, smoothly, and comfortably for the user. That's the real source of advantage. Businesses have started to understand this, so good design will become the price of entry. ... Customers appreciate good design. While they can't necessarily point out what specifically makes it good, they know it feels better. There's a visceral connection. They are willing to pay for it, if you give them a great experience.James P. Hackett, President and CEO, Steelase

We who are clay blended by the Master Potter, come from the kiln of Creation in many hues. How can people say one skin is colored, when each has its own coloration? What should it matter that one bowl is dark and the other pale, if each is of good design and serves its purpose well.Polingaysi Qoyawayma, Hopi

Good design is probably 98% common sense. Above all, an object must function well and efficiently—and getting that part right requires a good deal of time and attention.Terence Conran, Founder and Chairman, Conran Holdings Ltd.

Good design is serious business.A.G. Lafley, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive, Procter & Gamble

The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living.Harry Bertoia

Good designing is insightful. It's the insight that makes it happen.Charles Owens, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Insitute of Design, IIT

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beautry to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.Paola Antonelli

The difference between good design and great design is intelligence.Tibor Kalman

Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.

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Dieter Rams

Good design is innovative Gives a product utility Is aesthetic Makes a product easy to understand Is unobtrusive Is honest Is long-lived Is consistent down to the smallest detail Protects the environment Good design is as little design as possible.Dieter Rams

Rather than overpowering nature or limiting human impact, good design will affirm the possibility of developing healthy and creatively interactive relationships between human settlements and the natural world.William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Buildings Like Trees, Cities Like Forests

Good design doesn’t cost, but it pays.Richard H. Driehaus, Chicago Money Manager and Philanthropist, Richard H. Driehaus Foundation

I love the idea of slowness. It took thousands of years to come to the conclusion that we think of as a chair. Vitra moves fast in comparison to that, but I do think that every object has a natural evolutionary pace. If Charles Eames had said, “We have to finish it fast fast fast!” his chairs wouldn't be relevant a half-century later. I believe in getting things right. In our industry, you can’t force something if you want it to be good. It has to become. Every object is a being with a soul. Our work is to find that soul. Sometimes we can’t manage to find it, and we have to abandon the project or try again. We’re not worried about being first to market, because what we do is unique by its very nature. Good design is relevant for decades; a year matters little on that scale.Rolf Fehlbaum, CEO, Vitra

Good designers relentlessly generate lots of ideas and open-mindedly consider alternative solutions. At no time are good designers frightened to entertain a crazy, competing, or uncomfortable idea.Karl Ulrich, CEO, Nova Cruz Products

When you feel the architecture just click, as though it couldn’t have been anything else, it’s due to a true understanding of the site and the plan and section.Stephen Kanner, Architect

Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain subset of people in the culture) that draws on a shared

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symbolic expression for the ordering of such goals.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Author of Flow

Good design today requires more vision (a larger point of view versus the single brilliant idea), more consistency (a deeper underlying structure of language and form versus the simple, uniform application of visual elements) and more patience (persistence over time versus creative authoritarianism).William Drenttel, partner, Jessica Helfand/William Drenttel design

Good design is a form of respect—on the part of the producer for the person who will eventually spend hard-earned cash on the product, use the product, own the product.David Brown, editor of Gain

Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.Freeman Thomas, Automobile Designer, DaimlerChrysler

The good designer aims at a perfect fusion of the various considerations which enter into his design. He aims at an untortured unity—a direct whole. He arranges his levels consciously or subconsciously, adhearing to the requisites of the problem he is asked to solve or to his own inclination. Some designers see total act through a disc of aesthetic considerations—others, more practical minded, may put economic considerations at top level.Leo Lionni, Graphic Designer

Good design should reflect a sense of human history—some aspect of where we’ve come from.Harmutt Esslinger, Founder and CEO, FrogDesign Inc.

Good design is an act not an artifact. Good design can be achieved through resonance between various stakeholders.Uday Dandavate, Principal, SonicRim

Good design, at least part of the time, includes the criterion of being direct in relation to the problem at hand—not obscure, trendy, or stylish. A new language, visual or verbal, must be couched in a language that is already understood.Ivan Chermayeff, Graphic Designer and

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Principal, Chermayeff & Geismar

Good design helps build and sustain competitive advantage.Brian Gillespie, “Strategic Design Management in 250 Floors or Less,” Design Management Institute e-Bulletin, April 2003

We interact with design on two levels: the physical and the emotional. We have a word for the physical part: ergonomics—what feels good to you. I call the emotional level “psychonomics”—what makes you feel good. The baseline of good design is a perfect balance of the two.Davin Stowel, Founder and president, Smart Design 

 

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Gone are the excesses of the ’80s and the style-first approach of the ’90s. In their place is an appreciation of everything that surrounds us and means something. We’ve recognized that in today’s society of fear, we need mental comfort as much as physical comfort, and we’re offering wit, irony, nostalgia, and imagery in everyday products. Charles Eames asked, “Whoever said that pleasure is not a function?”Tovah Trace

Increasingly, corporations will look to advertising agencies for direction. Without an understanding of brand creation, messaging, and strategy, today’s designers are destined to become the haidressers of tomorrow’s creative environments—great for styling but light on strategy.Harmutt Esslinger, Founder and CEO, FrogDesign Inc.