Top 100 The Design Quotes
#1. What are they going to do about it?"
"So far? Get drunk. Yell at each other or at us. Design theoretical judicial systems. Most of them seem to want the whole thing to just go away sot hey can get on with their research."
Murtry chuckled. "God bless the eggheads.
James S.A. Corey
#2. Styles come and go, design goes on forever: solving communication problems with new tools applied to the same old common sense.
Ivan Chermayeff
#3. The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory.
Eric Maskin
#4. Design is both a political and cultural force for change, although most designers choose not to think about the power it has.
Jonathan Barnbrook
#5. A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance
Richard Dawkins
#6. If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.
David Benioff
#7. The design process is about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers.
Jonathan Ive
#8. Then what exactly is it that you design?"
He gave a proud smile.
"Bitless compositions."
"Bitless? You mean, from bits, the units of information?"
"No, Mr. Tichy, the units of being bitten.
Stanislaw Lem
#9. 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.
Ellen Lupton
#10. I describe the design process as like the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see is the long haul: all the endless auditing and things like that.
Norman Foster
#11. But just [proposing the standard] puts companies on notice that if you're looking to construct a new natural-gas or coal facility, you really need to pay attention to these. This is what they should be designing new facilities toward as soon as this proposal hits the streets.
Gina McCarthy
#12. Define what the product will do before you design how the product will do it.
Alan Cooper
#13. Videogames are indeed design: They're sophisticated virtual machines that echo the mechanical systems inside cars.
John Maeda
#14. Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.
Donald A. Norman
#15. Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. Evolutionary learning calls upon our creative potentials as it empowers us to envision images of the future and bring those images to life by design.
Bela H. Banathy
#17. A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.
Nan Fairbrother
#18. It's a corset design making me look very, very slim and trim. I call it a corset dress. Very Hollywood glamour with the silk.
Serena Williams
#19. I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour - and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer.
Christian Louboutin
#21. Spend your time designing the greatest reputation a man could possess.
Chris Murray
#23. Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost ... Features have a documentation cost. Every feature adds pages to the manual increasing training costs.
Douglas Crockford
#24. A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing.
Rhianna Pratchett
#25. Probably not true, but remember this: someone really did design the Titanic and then label it unsinkable. For
Stephen King
#26. It was by design that we mostly used pictures that you could not necessarily see what was going on, and that didn't really focus in on the band, but instead focused in on a theme.
Mike McCready
#27. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product.
Jonathan Ive
#28. The Way of Tao is this: It strives not, but conquers; It speaks not, but all is made clear; It summons not, but its house is crowded; It contrives not, but the design is perfect.
Laozi
#29. Do work you love and are passionate about, look outside of the world of graphic design for inspiration.
Jessica Walsh
#30. Design and style should work toward making you look good and feel good without a lot of effort so you can get on with the things that matter.
Donna Karan
#31. Design is the best way to get from A to B when you don't yet know what B is.
Cheryl Heller
#32. I believe that bad taste is vulgar. It's like cursing. I think the world can be saved through design, because what is the most distasteful thing someone can do? Kill someone. So, good taste is the opposite of that.
Kanye West
#33. These are all combinations of ancient design wisdom and the latest technology.
Nick Rosen
#34. The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department.
Frank Zappa
#35. The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.
Isaac Asimov
#36. As a group, we want to follow good and green strategy. Setting targets is one element of that. The second part is to design products which meet environmental goals.
Jamshyd Godrej
#37. 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.
Edward Tufte
#38. I had a faux-hawk for a while and I used to buzz the sides and design it. It was really bad.
Joe Jonas
#39. The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems.
Neil Gershenfeld
#40. By God's design, he has wired his children for spiritual reproduction. He has woven into the fabric of every single Christian's DNA a desire and ability to reproduce.
David Platt
#41. In just six weeks from the time the design was started, we had the motor on the block testing its power.
Orville Wright
#42. Mediocre design provably wastes the world's resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness. Design is important.
Fred Brooks
#43. Our weavings in the cosmic web are not self-contained. Rather, they are part of the design of our collective humanity.
Lisa Hunt
#44. Still hope leads men to venture; and no one ever yet put himself in peril without the inward conviction that he would succeed in his design.
Thucydides
#45. Increasingly, corporations will look to advertising agencies for direction. Without an understanding of brand creation, messaging, and strategy, today's designers are destined to become the haidressers of tomorrow's creative environments-great for styling but light on strategy.
Hartmut Esslinger
#46. The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.
Oscar Wilde
#47. I wear a lot of different hats - from writer to producer and artist. We all do 5 or 6 jobs, everything from creating our own graphic design to actually recording and the whole bit.
William Bell
#48. When we better understand the realities of these women's lives, we are able to design and deliver solutions that are more useful to them.
Melinda Gates
#49. The design is about expectations. Everybody wants something from beautiful people. From beautiful women, especially. But I think they're most stunning when they refuse to give anyone anything.
Susan Juby
#50. Software design as taught today is terribly incomplete. It talks only about what systems should do. It doesn't address the converse - things systems should not do. They should not crash, hang, lose data, violate privacy, lose money, destroy your company, or kill your customers.
Michael T. Nygard
#52. 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
#53. I've learned a tremendous amount over the years by watching designers work. I now have a good understanding of what sits well on the body, not to mention the importance of a great cut and quality.
Claudia Schiffer
#54. Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy.
Jan Tschichold
#55. Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#56. Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American 'invention.' The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone.
Yanis Varoufakis
#57. What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#58. When East meets West, amazing design happens. L'Alahambra rug is a marriage of the clean line and simplicity of Western graphic design meets the complexity and beauty of Eastern pattern.
Genevieve Gorder
#59. The most important driver of user satisfaction is usefulness, which is largely reflected in the interaction design. The interaction design has to be incorporated at the deepest level of the software architecture and it is often the most expensive to change late in the process.
Arnie Lund
#60. The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong.
Marty Neumeier
#61. Chaos is the enemy of any organization the strives to be outstanding.
Karen Martin
#62. Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is not easily explained, and raises the natural question of why it is that way.
Stephen Hawking
#63. The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven.
Christopher Buehlman
#64. Technology may change rapidly, but people change slowly. The principals [of design] come from understanding of people. They remain true forever.
Donald A. Norman
#65. An artist's job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master - be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography.
Anonymous
#66. I think psychoanalyze-pinhead is the important lesson of GNU Emacs.
Todd Bennett
#67. If you wish to draw profit, read with humility, simplicity, and faith, and never with the design of gaining a reputation for learning.
Thomas A Kempis
#68. A man often thinks he rules himself, when all the while he is ruled and managed; and while his understanding directs one design, his affections imperceptibly draw him into another.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#69. The fundamental idea of design is to make the world a better place.
Bruce Mau
#70. The federal debt in this country is principally of Republican design.
Daniel Keys Moran
#71. The promise I've tried to honor my entire career, that the rule of law and the design of the founders, right, the oversight of courts and the oversight of Congress will be at the heart of what the FBI does.
James Comey
#72. We also had a team of costumers that would do samples for us, of fabrics, textures, people doing silhouettes of things up on dress forms, just to kind of inform the design process. Through all of that we got to the point that we had to figure out how to light them up. So that was a huge undertaking.
Christine Bieselin Clark
#73. Leaders can create a high productivity level by providing the appropriate organizational structure and job design, and by acknowledging and appreciating hard work.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#74. My role is to find strategic insights as to where design can have the most business impact. A designer can bring a viewpoint of not just aesthetics, but economics and usage.
John Maeda
#75. Having one foot in design and the other in sustainable and social projects, I hear this question quite often: 'Why does the world need another chair?' My answer is that the world needs another chair/bicycle/car or any new product for that matter, like the world needs another book.
Yves Behar
#77. You are not designing for yourself, and shouldn't be. Most people using the Web don't understand (most of) what makes it work and don't want to. Design for those people. There are many more of them than you.
Max Levchin
#78. Costume design allows you to do a different type of research and create characters, whereas in fashion, you create an image and clothing for the masses.
Colleen Atwood
#79. Integrating breakthrough technology into everyday products is always a challenge; at the same time, this is exactly how design makes tech products easily adoptable in life.
Yves Behar
#80. Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.
William A. Dembski
#81. 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
#82. We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place.
Edward De Bono
#83. It's not all that important that you be able to originate brilliant ideas... The more important talent is to be able to recognize good ideas from other people.
Eric S. Raymond
#84. It is a mortifying truth, and ought to teach the wisest of us humility, that many of the most valuable discoveries have been the result of chance rather than of contemplation, and of accident rather than of design.
Charles Caleb Colton
#85. I really believe I know why my designs were better than any other human being, but I don't want to take credit for starting Apple, for turning the world around or anything like that.
Steve Wozniak
#86. The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.
Lorenzo Ghiberti
#87. We do not make very full value of the opportunities provided by technology because we prefer critical to constructive thinking, argument to design.
Edward De Bono
#88. We opened a design center in the South of England last year as part of our strategy for being close to our customers and developing innovative products for exciting new markets.
David Milne
#89. I love Prada shirts because they're so decorative and figure-hugging, but I also like Reiss shirts because they're clean, simple and look as if they've come off the peg from a design house.
Jamie Bamber
#90. There are many possible approaches to Australian garden design, and they all reflect the designer's individual response to gardens. For my part, I love all things most gardeners abhor ... I like the whole thing to be as wild as possible, so that you have to fight your way through in places ...
Edna Walling
#91. The best design work is really done when you spend more time with people, when you have the opportunity to be of the same mindset and the same incentives as the founder of the business.
Yves Behar
#92. Design is a constant challenge to balance comfort with luxe, the practical with the desirable.
Donna Karan
#93. Affectation of candour is common enough - one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design - to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad - belongs to you alone.
Jane Austen
#94. Architecture is about ideas in the first place. You don't get to design until you have an idea.
Lebbeus Woods
#95. The late eighties was a good vintage. ID was not yet fashionable so a lot of people were doing it for the right reasons - to make good design, not become stars.
Leander Kahney
#96. Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
Fred Brooks
#97. Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it.
John Malkovich
#98. I don't consider what you're wearing when I design a shoe. I don't have a particular look in mind or make a shoe thinking, "This would look great with a blue pinstripe suit." I just let you dress yourself. I'm looking at the shoe itself, not as a component of an outfit.
Mark McNairy
#99. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.
James Salter
#100. Schoolchildren are not taught how to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate information online - surely there are ways to design web-browsers to help with this task and ways to teach young people how to use the powerful online tools available to them.
Howard Rheingold
