Design Quotes

The details are not the details. They make the design.
Charles Eames

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

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

Space is the breath of art.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
Elon Musk

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

Fashion fades, only style remains the same.
Coco Chanel

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.
Le Corbusier

Luck is the residue of design.
Branch Rickey

A shoe is not only a design, but it’s a part of your body language, the way you walk. The way you’re going to move is quite dictated by your shoes.
Christian Louboutin

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

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

Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.
Dieter Rams

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

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

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

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

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

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

The primary factor is proportions.
Arne Jacobsen

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

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George Santayana

Designing is a matter of concentration. You go deep into what you want to do. It’s about intensive research, really. The concentration is warm and intimate and like the fire inside the earth – intense but not distorted. You can go to a place, really feel it in your heart. It’s actually a beautiful feeling.
Peter Zumthor

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

Good design doesn’t date.
Harry Seidler

A camel is a horse designed by committee.
Alec Issigonis

 

Design is a constant challenge to balance comfort with luxe, the practical with the desirable.
Donna Karan

Design is people.
Jane Jacobs

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

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
William Butler Yeats

Accessible design is good design.
Steve Ballmer

Eventually everything connects – people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.
Charles Eames

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

It’s all in how you arrange the thing… the careful balance of the design is the motion.
Andrew Wyeth

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

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

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

I believe in empty spaces; they’re the most wonderful thing.
Anselm Kiefer

I don’t think there is anything wrong with white space. I don’t think it’s a problem to have a blank wall.
Annie Leibovitz

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

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

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

The artist in me cries out for design.
Robert Frost

We design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.
Anne-Marie Willis

Design is about creating spaces for people to enjoy and of course, creating moments where you elevate the spirit, but ‘design for good’ is figuring out a program that not only creates better spaces, but creates jobs, creates new industry and really kind of raises the conversation about how we rebuild.
Cameron Sinclair

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture.
Peter York

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.
Mitch Kapor

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

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.
Christopher Alexander

Design is everything. Everything!
Paul Rand

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

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

 

All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth – it requires an ensemble of correct assumptions and valid calculations.
Henry Petroski

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

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

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

I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn’t have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn’t have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.
John Maeda

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

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

Clothes and jewellery should be startling, individual. When you see a woman in my clothes, you want to know more about them. To me, that is what distinguishes good designers from bad designers.
Alexander McQueen

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

The aim of being a good designer is to have an influence. If you design furniture or lifestyle, you should influence the way people evolve globally. It’s good to have an influence.
Olivier Theyskens

The space within becomes the reality of the building.
Frank Lloyd Wright

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

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.
Coco Chanel

Good design doesn’t date. Bad design does.
Paul Rand

Good design is good business.
Thomas J. Watson

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

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

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

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

Design is so critical it should be on the agenda of every meeting in every single department.
Tom Peters

I’m not like most designers, who have to set sail on an exotic getaway to get inspired. Most of the time, it’s on my walk to work, or sitting in the subway and seeing something random or out of context.
Alexander Wang

Sacred spaces can be created in any environment.
Christy Turlington

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

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.
Paul Rand

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

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

 

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

In designing hardware to be used every day, it was important to keep both the human aspects and the machine in mind. What looks good also often feels good.
Michael Graves

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

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

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

Good design is good business.
Ian Schrager

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 A. Simon

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

If I have a style, I am not aware of it.
Michael Graves

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

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.
Rem Koolhaas

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

British innovation in design, in the creative arts, in engineering and manufacturing is world class.
Margaret Heffernan

I make spaces that are calm rather than confrontational. I seek a certain kind of logic that allows you to move in space and perceive it as beautiful and rational. Clarity is a worthwhile quality.
Annabelle Selldorf

It’s a very strange thing for a designer to say, but one of the things that really irritates me in products is when I’m aware of designers wagging their tails in my face.
Jonathan Ive

I’m a designer, and I think if you work in fashion, you have to give people fantasy.
Christian Louboutin

Anyone with a computer and a design program can create a page layout. But unless you’re trained in design, it won’t look very good and it won’t communicate very well.
John Maeda

Design is an unknown.
Geoffrey Beene

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

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

Buildings designed with careful attention to aesthetics arouse and enlighten their occupants and that promotes their good health.
Robert Evans

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

Everyday people are not very good designers.
Donald Norman

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

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

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins

 

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

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

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.
Kanye West

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Friedrich August von Hayek

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

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.
Tony Hoare

The big difference between couture and ready-to-wear is not design. It is the fabrics, the handwork, and the fittings. The act of creation is the same.
Yves Saint Laurent

Gucci is not a fashion or a design house, it was always a trademark.
Maurizio Gucci

We look at life from the back side of the tapestry. And most of the time, what we see is loose threads, tangled knots and the like. But occasionally, God’s light shines through the tapestry, and we get a glimpse of the larger design with God weaving together the darks and lights of existence.
John Piper

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

We experience happiness as a series of pleasing moments. They come and go like clouds, unpredictable, fleeting, and without responsibility to our desires. Through honest self-work, reflection, and meditation, we begin to string more of these moments together, creating a web-like design of happiness that drapes around our lives.
Tara Stiles

I live in a craftsman house, but I’m a big fan of modernist and mid-century furniture and architecture, too. But my dream is to do a truly original chair design, something that is all these different things but is my own, too.
Luke Macfarlane

I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.
B. F. Skinner

People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you’re lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.
Carrie-Anne Moss

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
Freeman Dyson

Sustainability can’t be like some sort of a moral sacrifice or political dilemma or a philanthropical cause. It has to be a design challenge.
Bjarke Ingels

Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.
Ellen Ullman

My hair is different than a lot of people’s. I like my hair. I like the fade. I like the little design I have. I’m cool with it. Obviously my hair is thin on top, so it looks like a bald spot, but I really could care less.
Trae Young

In order to design a future of positive change, we must first become expert at changing our minds.
Jacque Fresco

Wellness is not a ‘medical fix’ but a way of living – a lifestyle sensitive and responsive to all the dimensions of body, mind, and spirit, an approach to life we each design to achieve our highest potential for well-being now and forever.
Greg Anderson

I’m not into fashion, but I like design. I wear the same shoes every day.
Tyler, The Creator

To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.
Paul Rand

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few.
Victor Papanek

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

The essence of architecture is form and space, and light is the essential element to the key to architectural design, probably more important than anything. Technology and materials are secondary.
I. M. Pei

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