Quotes About Design

1. Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. – Steve Jobs

2. 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

3. The artist in me cries out for design. – Robert Frost

4. 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-Exupery

5. Sometimes I can’t figure designers out. It’s as if they flunked human anatomy. – Erma Bombeck

6. Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance. – Samuel Johnson

7. I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. – Anna Quindlen

8. Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated. – Paul Rand

9. I don’t design clothes, I design dreams. – Ralph Lauren

10. Designers are very fickle. I never wanted to be a victim of that. You’re in one minute, out the next. – Tyra Banks

11. Good design is good business. – Thomas J. Watson

12. Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all… good design must primarily serve people. – Thomas J. Watson

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

14. It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color – not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression. – Henri Matisse

15. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. – Herbert Simon

16. Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal While others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before. – Herodotus

17. The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line. – Arthur Erickson

18. Sacred spaces can be created in any environment. – Christy Turlington

19. Design works if it’s authentic, inspired, and has a clear point of view. It can’t be a collection of input. – Ron Johnson

20. Perhaps believing in good design is like believing in God, it makes you an optimist. – Terence

21. Delay always breeds danger and to protract a great design is often to ruin it. – Miguel de Cervantes

22. Luck is the residue of design. – Branch Rickey

23. Color does not add a pleasant quality to design – it reinforces it. – Pierre Bonnard

24. Good buildings come from good people, ad all problems are solved by good design. – Stephen Gardiner

25. 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

26. Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design. – Charles Eames

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

28. Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginnings. – Robert Collier

29. Design is not for philosophy it’s for life. – Issey Miyake

30. About half my designs are controlled fantasy, 15 percent are total madness and the rest are bread-and-butter designs. – Manolo Blahnik

31. 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

32. This is what I like about being a designer: You can’t really get it until you see it. – Isaac Mizrahi

33. To design the future effectively, you must first let go of your past. – Charles J. Givens

34. When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space. – Tadao Ando

35. A good designer must rely on experience, on precise, logic thinking and on pedantic exactness. No magic will do. – Niklaus Wirth

36. Design is everything. Everything! – Paul Rand

37. I like the body. I like to design everything to do with the body. – Gianni Versace

38. The primary factor is proportions. – Arne Jacobsen

39. I design for the woman who loves being a woman. – Diane von Furstenberg

40. Good design doesn’t date. – Harry Seidler

41. I think it’s really important to design things with a kind of personality. – Marc Newson

42. Accessible design is good design. – Steve Ballmer

43. In my opinion, no single design is apt to be optimal for everyone. – Donald Norman

44. The proper study of mankind is the science of design. – Herbert Simon

45. So, to really execute design in its highest form and making people feel joy, that’s a great reward. – Genevieve Gorder

46. I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings. – Daniel Libeskind

47. 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

48. Design is people. – Jane Jacobs

49. A designer is only as good as the star who wears her clothes. – Edith Head

50. The design of each element should be thought out in order to be easy to make and easy to repair. – Leo Fender

51. I don’t start with a design objective, I start with a communication objective. I feel my project is successful if it communicates what it is supposed to communicate. – Mike Davidson

52. I would think twice about designing stuff for which there was no need and which didn’t endure. – Robin Day

53. Design is an unknown. – Geoffrey Beene

54. Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long. – Kenzo Tange

55. Outside of the chair, the teapot is the most ubiquitous and important design element in the domestic environment and almost everyone who has tackled the world of design has ended up designing one. – David McFadden

56. To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master. – Milton Glaser

57. Great designers seldom make great advertising men, because they get overcome by the beauty of the picture – and forget that merchandise must be sold. – James Randolph Adams

58. Design is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human problems by identifying them and executing the best solution. – Ivan Chermayeff

59. Happiness is not something you postpone for the future it is something you design for the present. – Jim Rohn

60. If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. – Jim Rohn

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

62. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. – Steve Jobs

63. Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. – Steve Jobs

64. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life. – Henry David Thoreau

65. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together. – Steve Jobs

66. In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. – Steve Jobs

67. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. – Steve Jobs

68. I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work. – Bob Dylan

69. Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy. – Bill Gates

70. In giving us children, God places us in a position of both leadership and service. He calls us to give up our lives for someone else’s sake – to abandon our own desires and put our child’s interests first. Yet, according to His perfect design, it is through this selflessness that we can become truly fulfilled. – Charles Stanley

71. Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself. – Marcus Aurelius

72. The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows. – Frank Zappa

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