Popular quotes about Design! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration.
Jeffrey ZeldmanMy opening line to my students, and a recurring theme in my classes, was that the big design problem isn't designing a house for your parents or yourself, a museum, or a toaster, or a book, or whatever. The big design problem is designing your life. It's by the design of your life that you create the backboard off which you bounce all your thoughts and ideas and creativity. You have to decide what it is that you want to do each day.
Richard Saul WurmanDesign 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 PapanekDesign is all about relationships. Unfortunately, many designers donโt fully appreciate this. Some of the best design work Iโve ever done was drinking coffee or beers with engineers, marketing people, and business development hustlers. And I wholeheartedly mean design work.
Daniel BurkaIn any given marketplace, there's a triangle. There's a line of Dior goods at $25,000 that creates the sharp focus you need to sell $100 scarves to every woman. When [Design Miami] Basel popped on the scene, it proved there's a market for the top of the design triangle, which will lead the wide base beneath it.
Benjamin WatsonSomething I always wanted to do, to capture that later half of the '70s. It's like the early half of the '70s is still the '60s, in that there's still kind of a playfulness and inventiveness in terms of design and the things that were going on in the culture. The second half, it got much more commodified. It's possibly the ugliest era of architecture and clothes and design in the entire 20th century, from 1975 to '81 or '82.
Daniel ClowesDesign in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
D. H. LawrenceThe Open Hearts design was inspired by my Mom's advice that only when you keep your heart open can you best give and receive love. My hope is that the design will become a universal symbol of keeping an open heart - open to life's new experiences, open to allow something new and beautiful to come in.
Jane SeymourGraphic design, which evokes the symmetria of Vituvius, the dynamic symmetry of Hambidge, the asymmetry of Mondrian; which is a good gestalt, generated by intuition or by computer, by invention or by a system of coordinates, is not good design if it does not communicate.
Paul RandPeople say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that's ok.
Zaha HadidThe last 10% of game design is really what separates the good games from the great games. It's what I call the clean-up phase of game design. Here's where you make sure all the elements look great. The game should look good, feel good, sound good, play good.
Garry KitchenPhotography really is all about lines, and so is clothing. I worked for Oberto Gili for a couple of years after I was at ICP; we worked in fashion, travel, interior design, everything. I was inspired by his styling choices within fashion photography, and I think those experiences helped steer me towards fashion design. I love photography as a medium, so I think I will always take inspiration from it.
Minnie MortimerA good designer can create a design that accommodates all the constraints and still delivers an elegant, satisfying experience to the user. A great designer can go beyond this and create a design that demonstrates that some of those constraints werenโt really there to begin with.
Jesse James GarrettIf you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over.
John MedinaJay Harman is the quintessential biomimic, a principled inventor who sees solutions everywhere he looks in the natural world. And he looks deeply, with the soul of a student. He moves with grace from a world of waving sea kelp to the world of sustainable design, bringing nature's wisdom into the board rooms of global companies, to the design tables of the engineers and designers who make our world. This is more than a business book, more than a memoir, more than a new way to solve global challenges. It's a book about a new way to think.
Janine BenyusI've been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving.
Jeffrey VeenMost people assume because I'm an actor that's all I know about and care about, I'm actually a camera geek and a film geek. I grew up making short films the same time I was acting. For me, it's a motion picture, not a play. I'm just as interested in what the camera department is doing and world building through costume design and production design as I am in acting. I think all good directors do that whether they're an actor or not.
Matt RossOur crisis is a birth. We are one living system and we have come to the limit of one phase of natural growth on a finite planet We must learn ethical evolution quickly As we seek to facilitate a gentle birth, a graceful and nonviolent transition to the next stage of our evolution, we will discover a natural pattern, a design of our birth transition, and develop a plan to cooperate with this design.
Barbara Marx HubbardDesign is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take.
Chip KiddTo design a desk which may cost $1,000 is easy for a furniture designer but to design a functional and good desk which shall cost only $50 can only be done by the very best
Ingvar KampradIf there is ever a science of programming language design, it will probably consist largely of matching languages to the design methods they support.
Robert W. FloydThe design of the gum is expressed in the flow of it trunk and limbs, and the design of the European tree mainly in its foliage. In Europe great masses of foliage first attract the eye, here the limbs and trunk, which, on account of their proportion and colour, make themselves felt first, and one thinks of the foliage as a secondary matter.
Hans HeysenThe first 10 years of my professional life had only to do with running away from my father. He was a wonderful cabinet-maker, and me being the eldest son, I had to take over his shop, his profession and so on and so on. I tried to escape by going to art school and then going on to industrial design and then interior design.
Peter ZumthorI have half a dozen designers who work for me, they 'realise' most of the design work, and I act as the design director and the main point of client contact on each project.
Michael BierutOne of the great things about design is that it's truly international. No one in the design industry would say, "This country is mine," or "I will make it look this way because it's for an American market and that way for a Chinese market." If you look at all of the Apple products, they are the same everywhere . . . I mean, I can't deny that I love traveling. It's a very healthy thing to be able to appreciate other cultures - or at least witness them firsthand. And all of that goes into helping someone be a good designer, because it's an international business.
Marc NewsonGood restaurant design is about achieving equilibrium between the food, service, and design - in effect, telling a complete story.
David RockwellI never thought I'd be able to design all the things I've been able to design. I thought that I'd be far more limited to a specific kind of work, and I've been able to establish an incredibly broad practice in all different ways, and it's because the expectations have gotten elevated.
Paula ScherI was doing a lot of web design at the time. And anybody that has an agent thinks, "Why do I need an agent?" Maybe it's a little different as an actor - of course you need an agent - but any kind of agency that's selling something for you, you think, "Why can't I sell this myself? It doesn't make sense."
Jeff VespaNot a step can we take in any direction without perceiving the most extraordinary traces of design; and the skill everywhere conspicuous is calculated in so vast a proportion of instances to promote the happiness of living creatures, and especially of ourselves, that we feel no hesitation in concluding that, if we knew the whole scheme of Providence, every part would appear to be in harmony with a plan of absolute benevolence.
Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and VauxAnd I'm the first one to tell people to break the rules. But you can only break the rules once you know what the rules are. The other thing is, fashion is the last design discipline to actually have academic texts and historical analysis.
Tim GunnI think someone should design exercise machines that reward people with sex at the end of their workouts, because people will perform superhuman feats for even the faint hope of that.
Tina FeyDesign, to me, is part psychology, part sociology, and part magic. A good decorator should know what's going on in someone's marriage and how their kids are doing in school.
Nate BerkusThe Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents--or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.
C. S. LewisMy design has always been a derivative of people I meet. I want to translate who they are and their personality into a room.
Jeremiah BrentIn design it is important to shoe the effect of an action. ... Feedback is critical.
Donald A. NormanGood design is long-lasting! It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated.
Dieter RamsThe spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird.
Laurens van der PostThere was a school in Chicago called the School of Design. This was started by [Laszlรณ] Moholy-Nagy, and it was a wonderful school, but we [with Alix MacKenzie] didn't go to that school. We did have friends who went to that school and we would visit there often, and I'm sure it pushed me in my painting direction very strongly just by association.
Warren MacKenzieCountless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.
Neil deGrasse TysonNever far from a dining table, the characters in Heather A. Slomski's limpid and elegant debut collection are not given to melodramatics. Civility reigns, voices are not raised, much goes unsaid. But just beneath the sophisticated composure are longing, loss, heartbreak. And how intensely familiar is the table itself, which made this reader suddenly understand how much of our real life takes place there. Heather A. Slomski is truly a fresh voice on the scene, and The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons is that rare thing, a new book as innovative in its design as it is compulsively readable.
Jaimy Gordon