Design Quotes

A distinctive appearance and a simple set of characteristics lead to an extremely flexible brand. (pg. 38)

~ Woodrow Phoenix

We are … the un-proud non-possessors of objects whose chief substance is that of the transient symbol. Our Puritan fear of the love of things turns out to have been groundless after all, for we do not love things or even possess them: they pass through our lives as barium passes through the digestive tract, unassimilated, their function merely to flash signals along the way.

~ Ralph Caplan

Basic geometric shapes communicate universal qualities common to all cultures. Practical design integrates them appropriately.

~ Maggie Macnab

In geometry, as in nature, the circle is the archetypal shape of wholeness and inclusion. It is an effective shape for nonprofits or community-focused efforts.

~ Maggie Macnab

Branding is simply pattern recognition, established across multiple tiers of application and fueled by the energy of money.

~ Maggie Macnab

Optimal design delivers information in ways that are useful, beautiful and improve the experience of all involved: audience, client and designer.

~ Maggie Macnab

A company has integrity when its words and actions consistently match the branding effort.

~ Maggie Macnab

Strip your website down to the basics and do a few things really well.

~ B C Designers

There comes a point when you realize that these things, these brands, aren't enough. Having more or better or best doesn't provide you with a lasting sense of having more or being better or being best. It's a rather fleeting experience, this romantic attachment to brands, and I find that if I'm not careful, the search for having more or better or best is a precarious journey into the infinite. When you depend on finite objects-or brands-to provide you with a long-term sense of self or love or pride or achievement, you start yourself out on a path with no end. No object, no product, and no brand can provide you with ultimate, infinite satisfaction.

~ Debbie Millman

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

~ Chip Kidd

If the statistics are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers.

~ Edward R. Tufte

[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.

~ Jane Jacobs

You cannot defend your design without knowing what you're designing for.

~ I.m. Pei

I believe I’m very normal. I’m hyper-normal. I’m more normal than anyone else I know. I think my thoughts, my indulgences, my desires, my pleasures may at first appear different, but that is only because they are more normal, not because they are more esoteric.I believe I am bored when other people are bored, only faster. I am interested when others are interested, only more interested. But I also think I’m less, rather than more, intelligent than other people.By indulging my interests through my life, and perhaps because of rather than despite many failures, I have been able to design my life.

~ Richard Saul Wurman

Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures.

~ Tom Peters

Interior design is a business of trust.

~ Venus Williams

Good design is good business.

~ Thomas J. Watson

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.

~ Thomas J. Watson

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

~ Herbert Simon

Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.

~ Tim Berners-Lee

Design is about point of view, and there should be some sort of woman or lifestyle or attitude in one's head as a designer.

~ Vera Wang

In the end, I hope there's a little note somewhere that says I designed a good computer.

~ Steve Wozniak

I'm an artist. So if acting doesn't work out, which I hope it does, I'm probably going to go into graphic design or something like that.

~ Gabriel Basso

As all human beings are, in my view, creatures of God's design, we must respect all other human beings. That does not mean I have to agree with their choices or agree with their opinions, but indeed I respect them as human beings.

~ Stockwell Day

Initially, it was the unpractical in fashion that brought me to design my own line. I felt that it was much more attractive to cut clothes with respect for the living, three-dimensional body rather than to cover the body with decorative ideas.

~ Jil Sander

I think, aesthetically, car design is so interesting - the dashboards, the steering wheels, and the beauty of the mechanics. I don't know how any of it works, I don't want to know, but it's inspirational.

~ Paloma Picasso

I don't design clothes, I design dreams.

~ Ralph Lauren

We must look for ways to be an active force in our own lives. We must take charge of our own destinies, design a life of substance and truly begin to live our dreams.

~ Les Brown

I have lived with my husband more than I have with my parents... I live beside him, and know his worries, his hopes, and his dreams for his nation. We believe that things happen by design, not in an arbitrary way. And we believe it is our duty to make things happen.

~ Moza Bint Nasser

Federal regulations forbid delaying inspections for fracture-critical bridges like the fallen Minneapolis bridge - the kind with a lack of redundancy in design, so that a single failure in a load-bearing part can cause the entire bridge to collapse.

~ Bill Dedman

Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.

~ Henry Petroski

I employ case studies of failure into my courses, emphasizing that they teach us much more than studies of success. It is not that success stories cannot serve as models of good design or as exemplars of creative engineering. They can do that, but they cannot teach us how close to failure they are.

~ Henry Petroski

I've learnt something from every failure. The products I helped design at the first two companies I worked for were utter failures. But now I know why.

~ Tony Fadell

I think fashion is a lot of fun. I love clothes. More than fashion or brand labels, I love design. I love the thought that people put into clothes. I love when clothes make cultural statements and I think personal style is really cool. I also freely recognize that fashion should be a hobby.

~ Anne Hathaway

My aspiration isn't to be famous; it's to design clothes. If that gets me attention at the end of the day, cool.

~ Sofia Richie

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

~ Joshua Foer

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

By supporting all the links in the building chain and giving them an easy, intuitive tool for sharing model-based project information, GTeam enhances workflows and improves communication from design through to fabrication and assembly.

~ Greg Lynn

Space is the breath of art.

~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.

~ Philip Johnson