Creative Catalysts: Inspiring Design Quotes for Artistic Innovation
Design Quotes
1. “Design is intelligence made visible.”
— Alina Wheeler
2. “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
— Maya Angelou
3. “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
4. “Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.”
— Brian Reed
5. “The artist in me cries out for design.”
— Robert Frost
6. “The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It
is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it
lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.”
— Paul Rand
7. “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
8. “Design adds value faster than it adds costs.”
— Joel Spolsky
9. “Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.”
— Robert L. Peters
10. “Every great design begins with an even better story.”
— Lorinda Mamo
11. “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs
12. “The more I deal with the work as something that is my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is.”
— Marian Bantjes
13. “Design is not a single object or dimension. Design is messy and complex.”
— Natasha Jen
14. “Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”
— Elon Musk
15. “The alternative to good design is always bad design. There is no such thing as no design.”
— Adam Judge
16. “It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.”
— Paula Scher
17. “Design is so critical it should be on the agenda of every meeting in every single department.”
— Tom Peters
18. “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
19. “Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all… good design must primarily serve people.”
— Thomas J. Watson
20. “Accessible design is good design.”
— Steve Ballmer
21. “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
22. “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
23. “Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems.”
— Tim Brown
24. “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”
— Salvador Dali
25. “I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those two things.”
— Lindo Leader
26. “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, and really feel it in your heart.
It’s actually a beautiful feeling.”
— Peter Zumthor
27. “Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.”
— Ellen Lupton
28. “There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.”
— Milton Glaser
29. “The function of design is letting design function.”
— Micha Commeren
30. “Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.”
— Massimo Vignelli
31. “Design is a constant challenge to balance comfort with luxe, the practical with the desirable.”
— Donna Karan
32. “You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt … or in front of a piece of graphic design.”
— Stefan Sagmeister
33. “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
34. “If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to other good
work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients, it
will lead to other bad work for other bad clients.”
— Michael Bierut
35. “In my opinion, no single design is apt to be optimal for everyone.”
— Donald Norman
36. “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
37. “I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares, as opposed to ugly things. That’s my intent.”
— Saul Bass
38. “Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea wasn’t theirs.”
— Frank Chimero
39. “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”
— Jeffrey Zeldman
40. “I would think twice about designing stuff for which there was no need and which didn’t endure.”
— Robin Day
41. “The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living.”
— Harry Bertoia
42. “There’s design, and there’s art. Good design is total harmony.
There’s no better designer than nature – if you look at a branch or a
leaf, it’s perfect. It’s all function. Art is different. It’s about
emotion. It’s about suffering and beauty – but mostly suffering!”
— Diane von Furstenberg
43. “Art is to be free. Design is to fix.”
— Kanye West
44. “Design, whether it’s on your body or in your home, is the same
thing. It’s mixing different colors, different textures, and unexpected
patterns – elements that you wouldn’t often put together in an
interesting way.”
— Blake Lively
45. “A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.”
— David Hume
46. “Good design is like a refrigerator – when it works, no one notices, but when it doesn’t, it sure stinks.”
— Irene Au
47. “Design transcends agenda. It speaks to the politics of optimism.”
— Paul Bennett
48. “How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.”
— Andrew Grove
49. “Get rid of everything that is not essential to making a point.”
— Christoph Niemann
50. “The role of the designer is that of a good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests.”
— Charles Eames
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