Quotes About Design

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.

For years I thought I was just a writer, but when I sat down to design and started playing around with it, I realized that, really, it's pretty easy. Obviously it's more than just a set of rules, but the basics of design are actually pretty simple and quite mathematical. The link between data and design works at quite a fundamental level.

I simply love classic design when it's reinterpreted. These collections reflect the spirit of this design philosophy; clean pared down lines and forms rooted in tradition yet made to feel new and modern with unexpected or stylized scale, finishes and detailing. This contemporary take on tradition creates a look that's at once current yet timeless, fresh yet familiar…the essence of both beautiful design and a beautifully designed home.

I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming - or buying software - on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.

You can never design the best city, but you can design the best city you know how to design at this time.

Graphic 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.

I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era. I think of people I want to dress when I design.

There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. If something is cluttered and/or confusing, fix your design.

People say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that's ok.

Problems come about when we try to direct the flow of the universe rather than allow it to reveal its own design. Inherent in that design is a love for all living things.

Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection.

To design a home is to design happiness, to create for ourselves a little piece of joy.

I'm also interested in pets with alopecia. And design. I'm surprised I haven't gone through with a homeware brand. The bedding, the comforters, the candles, the this and that. I would like to design everything.

Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing.

To design things means to interfere with things: to think of how they might be and to alter how they are. Design is to making as writing is to speech: it is an ordinary physical activity pushed to a conscious edge. That interference with the given world can still be founded on admiration. Where it is not, what is the point of designing at all?

It isn't a question of enhancement through design. Whether an editor realizes it or not, design is part of what he does every time he prints the paper.

That we don't design agriculture to be sustainable is totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.

You have to design a story that might appear on the front page of the newspaper for the website. You don't have to design it in such a way that it can be self contained, that it makes sense if you never hit the front page of it.

I'd like mostly stuff for design, because I like to design clothing.

Really great design is hard. Good is the enemy of great. Competent design is not too much of a stretch. But if you are trying to do something new, you have challenges on so many axes.

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.

Character design, like story design, requires a hook to grab the reader’s attention.

While a case can be made for intelligent design, I can't figure out why some Christians are so thrilled about that possibility. First of all, it doesn't prove there's a God. If anything, intelligent design lends support to some form of pantheism that defines God as immanent within nature.

On every hand there seems to be design to defeat design. If God created man - if he is the father of us all, why did he make the criminals, the insane, the deformed and idiotic? Should the mother, who clasps to her breast an idiot child, thank God?

That was always my frustration with so many of these shows, because design is not an ambush... it's a relationship. You have to know how people move and live and work to be able to design for them.

I 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."

Burberry is now as much a media-content company as we are a design company...

Not 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.

And 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.

I don't like having a teaching job - office hours and conferences and committees and bosses and all that - but I tend to enjoy teaching, and I design the course in such a way that there'll be pleasure in that.

Sometimes people go off in a slightly different direction of wanting to be different, of wanting to be special, of wanting to be more, and I think that those people are often - not always, but often - genuinely different in some way. Perhaps their gender orientation is not acceptable or popular, not the norm. Or, their physical design is literally, in some way, setting them apart. Or, in many cases, they feel the burden of their ordinariness so dreadfully that they strive to find some way of being unique. I think that can be a very positive thing, but it also can be negative, destructive.

Whatever you are physically,' he said, 'Male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy -- all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. Whatever the color, the shape, the design of the shade that conceals it, the flame inside the lamp remains the same. You are the flame.

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'?

The 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.

Through all aspects of society be it art, design, the financial markets, government, technology or communications we are witnessing unprecedented global transformation - the result of which is impossible to predict.

Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.

Studying design has made me a much, much more astute observer of this aspect of business. And I'm working mightily to improve my empathic skills. I've dramatically improved my ability to read facial expressions - and I'm trying to be a better, more attentive listener.

I now add, farther, that the apostles argument is so far from proving it to be the duty of people to obey, and submit to, such rulers as act in contradiction to the public good, and so to the design of their office, that it proves the direct contrary.

You either commit yourself as a professional racing driver that's designed to win races or you come second or you come third or fifth and am not design to come third, fourth or fifth, I race to win.

Walking through the city streets... Is it by mistake or design?

Every design is a rigorous attempt to capture a concrete moment of a transitory image in all its nuances. The extent to which this transitory quality is captured, is reflected in the designs: the more precise they are, the more vulnerable.

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

I realize that having a style would be very beneficial for my practice from a marketing standpoint, but I can't do it. I believe my responsibilities as an architect are to design the most appropriate building for the place. Each place has a distinct culture and function, which for me requires an appropriate answer.

God always gave us light in our doubts, when we had no other design but to please Him.

If you stand for great service, low prices, superb quality, stylish design and environmental friendliness, you actually stand for nothing.

Right and wrong do not exist in graphic design. There is only effective and non-effective communication.

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