Quotes About Design

I like to question the minutia, to get to the essence of things. The minutia of life is all about design. It's about the design of how you talk to another human being; it's the design of speech; it's the design of everything we do. We need to be better at listening, and we need to aim more directly at understanding and being understood.

Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier.

Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.

This is what we've been waiting for: finally, an unprecedented critical analysis of the history of Dutch design. Mienke Simon Thomas's Dutch Design is a book to have and to read: an important and richly detailed study of the cultural, economical and social-political context of twentieth-century design in the Netherlands.

Many, many times I find that whatever is looking good on the screen doesn't always look or feel good on the body. So who do we design for - do we design for the screen, or do we design for women?

Something 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.

When you as a designer design something that burdens a community with maintenance and old world technology, basically failed developed world technology then you will crush that community way beyond bad design; you'll destroy the economics of that community and often the community socially is broken.

Design is not art. Design is utilitarian, art is not.

Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.

The 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.

A 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 weren’t really there to begin with.

Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything.

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

I think that you could design a terrible logo for a good company with great people and they could build it into a great program. Alternatively you could design what seems to be a brilliant logo for people who are not smart or energetic or are incapable of associating with anything positive and it would become a terrible logo.

The Senate, compared to the House, is where things are supposed to slow down, by design, Founding Father design. The Founding Fathers were hell-bent to stop government action. The Constitution limited government. And that's why people like Obama and Democrats call it a charter of negative liberties because it limits government. It's an anti-government, pro-citizen document. And the founders wanted to make it hard.

If there's a group like Amish people, that want to live their own lifestyle – they don't want to live in our city – they want to live out in the country, with their own projects. We’ll put up the buildings for them, design the buildings for them, design the food production systems for them – if they want us to. But we don’t control them.

Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take.

If there is ever a science of programming language design, it will probably consist largely of matching languages to the design methods they support.

Design is interesting because it's utopian. Art is often a jaundiced commentary on contemporary life. Design is always about the future; it's always about something great and new that's come out that will make the future brighter. It has this weird 18th - century positivism about it.

I 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.

Content informs design; design without content is decoration.

It seems that most the world is driven by the eye, right? They design cities to look great but they always sound horrible ... They design telephones to look great, but they sound horrible. I think it was about time that the other senses were celebrated.

My colleague Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, erroneously suggested that I support the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution. That simply is not true. ... Unlike biological evolution, intelligent design is not a genuine scientific theory and, therefore, has no place in the curriculum of our nation's public school science classes.

There is no "era" of simple, focused, concept-driven identity design. There is only design that grows out of understanding audiences for specific problems, and that evolves from an idea. This is an approach that does not depend on any specific time period or its technology.

In my book "Sound Unbound" we traced the guy who actually came up with the main concept for the graphic design of the record cover sleeve. His name is Alex Steinweiss. And one of the things in my book that we really tried to figure out was the revolution in graphic design that occurred when people put images on album covers.

I'm operating in the gap between the trajectory of modernity and the trajectory of modernism. So what people think is design is not design, it's my attempt to engage with the trajectory of modernity.

If any man whatsoever hath carried on the design of deposing the King and disinheriting his posterity; or if any man hath yet such a design he should be the greatest traitor and rebel in the world; but, since the Providence of God hath cast this upon us, I cannot but submit to Providence.

There's design and there's art. Good design is total harmony. There's no better designer than nature - if you look at a branch or a leaf, it's perfect. It's all function. Art is different. It's about emotion. It's about suffering and beauty - but mostly suffering!

An effective lighting design is like a beautiful painting. Your medium is bringing someone to an emotional state he or she would not achieve at that moment without your art. This does not and can not happen by accident.

Flair is a primitive kind of style. It is innate and cannot be taught. It can be polished and refined. When a person has flair, a grounding in the principle of design, and self-discipline, that person has the potential of being an outstanding designer.

I have been called an eco-designer simply because I use wood. But I am not an eco-designer, nor does the use of wood make me one. I am a designer who cares about the effect of what I do, and about making good things for people to keep and cherish - that, surely, is simply the basic condition for 'good design'?

To me, you can't have style without being inspired. When I design a collection, I am inspired by so many things. The color of a flower. The shape of a butterly's wing. The juxtaposition of an old tenement building next to a shiny new skyscraper.

That's just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.

Design my own line? No, I just like the culture.

I look in my closet, and if I need it, I design it.

Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they're made. So, for example, scientists didn't go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we're still finding things for a laser to do.

I really appreciate artists of the 20th century, and I can see a lot of their influence on my work, but to suggest that my design only fits within an 'ism' kind of bothers me.

User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's undervalued and underinvested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.

I not only enjoy it, I think, how do you design things that are applicable to life - unless you live it?

Great design is a multi-layered relationship between human life and its environment.

Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.

I have to perfect my beard every morning and it takes a long time. I think a lot of musicians are into graphic design and art. I decided to be a little bit of an artist on my face.

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.

Trying to find my way around the Rayburn building is always a challenge. Combining my poor sense of direction with a confusing design is not good.

Similar to computer technology in the '60s, 3-D printing is a universal technology that has the potential to revolutionize our life by enabling individuals to design and manufacture things.

Manufacturing productivity is greatly determined by the design of jobs and how workers are rewarded.

In terms of bridal dress, I've tried everything. I've tried short, long, deconstructed, constructed, bustiers, working in fabrics, working in color. I've been working in color in bridal for probably 15 years. Who else would do an entire collection dipped in tea? I did that one year. My design team dipped every single dress in tea in a bathtub. I did that just because I wanted to work out of the vocabulary of white.

Privacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that whether for pain or profit, by design or accident, we not call public attention to ourselves.