Recently I came accross var­i­ous web­sites filled with quotes from design­ers & artists from around the world, insipra­tional quotes to get you think­ing. In this arti­cle I have selected var­i­ous top design quotes that apply to my expe­ri­ence and gives me power to be cre­ative and think foward. I have also asked sev­eral fel­low blog­gers about their favourite design(ers) quotes and the feed­back was a very pos­i­tive and the inspir­ing list of quotes are embed­ded in this arti­cle. Please join in and add your favourite design(ers) quote in the com­ments, thank you very much!

Design­ers Quotes

Archi­tec­ture design quotes

• Organic archi­tec­ture seeks supe­rior sense of use and a finer sense of com­fort, expressed in organic sim­plic­ity. Frank Lloyd Wright
• I’ve always believed that archi­tec­ture is more impor­tant than dec­o­ra­tion. Scale and pro­por­tion give ever­last­ing sat­is­fac­tion that can­not be achieved by only icing the cake. Billy Bald­win

Design Phi­los­o­phy

• Design is in every­thing we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of craft, sci­ence, sto­ry­telling, pro­pa­ganda, and phi­los­o­phy. Erik Adi­gard
• Design is a plan for arrang­ing ele­ments in such a way as best to accom­plish a par­tic­u­lar pur­pose. Charles Eames
• Design’s fun­da­men­tal role is prob­lem solver. Fast Com­pany, 2005
• Good design, at least part of the time, includes the cri­te­rion of being direct in rela­tion to the prob­lem at hand — not obscure, trendy, or styl­ish. A new lan­guage, visual or ver­bal, must be couched in a lan­guage that is already under­stood. Ivan Cher­may­eff
• Good design is the most impor­tant way to dif­fer­en­ti­ate our­selves from our com­peti­tors. Sam­sung CEO Yun Jong Yong, 2004
• Graph­ics is the visual means of resolv­ing log­i­cal prob­lems. Bertin
• A design isn’t fin­ished until some­body is using it. Brenda Lau­rel
• Intel­li­gent design itself does not have any con­tent. George Gilder

Brand­ing

• Brand value is very much like an onion. It has lay­ers and a core. The core is the user who will stick with you until the very end. Edwin Artzt
• Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Steve Jobs, 2003
• A logo is not a brand. The BrandGap
• You are what you are seen to be. Erik Spiek­er­mann
• [logos are a] graphic exten­sion of the inter­nal real­i­ties of a com­pany. Saul Bass
• Acces­si­ble design is good design. Steve Ballmer

Busi­ness

• If you think it’s expen­sive to hire a pro­fes­sional to do the job, wait until you hire an ama­teur. Red Adair
• Some­times there is sim­ply no need to be either clever or orig­i­nal. Ivan Cher­may­eff
• Inven­tion is 10% inspi­ra­tion and 90% per­spi­ra­tion. Thomas Edi­son
• I don’t design clothes, I design dreams. Ralph Lau­ren

Typog­ra­phy

• Typog­ra­phy at its best is a visual form of lan­guage link­ing time­less­ness and time. Robert Bringhurst
• Most peo­ple think typog­ra­phy is about fonts. Most design­ers think typog­ra­phy is about fonts. Typog­ra­phy is more than that, it’s express­ing lan­guage through type. Place­ment, com­po­si­tion, type­choice. Mark Boul­ton
• Writ­ing is not a series of strokes, but space, divided into char­ac­ter­is­tic shapes by strokes. Ger­rit Noordzij, 1931
• From all these expe­ri­ences the most impor­tant thing I have learned is that leg­i­bil­ity and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should be only felt but not per­ceived by the reader. Adrian Frutiger
• Faces of type are like men’s faces. They have their own expres­sion; their com­plex­ion and pecu­liar twists and turns of line iden­tify them imme­di­ately to friends, to whom each is full of iden­tity. J.L. Fra­zier
• Great typophile thread with many more typo­graph­i­cal quotes.

Favourite design­ers quotes from fel­low bloggers

I have con­tact var­i­ous authors from design blogs and asked them their favourite design­ers quote, this came out as a very pos­i­tive and inspir­ing design quotes. Thank you for participating!

Jin Y from design & inspi­ra­tion blog 8164.org send in the fol­low­ing quote:
• Form fol­lows function-that has been mis­un­der­stood. Form and func­tion should be one, joined in a spir­i­tual union. Frank Lloyd

Com­ment by Jin Y: I’ve been a long time admirer of Mr. Wright’s work. His designs are ele­gant, sim­plis­tic and com­fort­able. As a web designer, I often see the cor­re­la­tions between good archi­tec­ture design and good web design. Both have the ele­ments of form and func­tion. I often hear peo­ple talk about form and func­tion as if they were mutu­ally exclu­sive, or one pre­cedes the other.

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Dmitry Fadeev from Usabil­i­ty­post send me the fol­low­ing quotes:
• The two most impor­tant tools an archi­tect has are the eraser in the draw­ing room and the sledge ham­mer on the con­struc­tion site.” Frank Lloyd Wright
• 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 thor­oughly under­stand some­thing — chew it up, not just quickly swal­low it .. .. A lot of peo­ple in our indus­try haven’t had very diverse expe­ri­ences. 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 designs we will have. Steve Jobs, Wired (March, 1996)

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David Airey from LogoDe­signLove and David Airey send in the fol­low­ing quote:
• The real issue is not tal­ent as an inde­pen­dent ele­ment, but tal­ent in rela­tion­ship to will, desire, and per­sis­tence. Tal­ent with­out these things van­ishes and even mod­est tal­ent with those char­ac­ter­is­tics grows. Mil­ton Glaser

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Dan Reynolds from Type­Off send in the fol­low­ing quotes:
• “Schrift ist nicht alles, denn Schrift ohne Anwen­dung ist wie eine Blume ohne Duft, ist wie eine ungeko­rkte Flasche und ein ungeküßtes Mäd­chen.” This could prob­a­bly be trans­lated as, “type is not every­thing, because type with­out an appli­ca­tion is like a flower with­out aroma, an uncorked bot­tle and a girl who has never been kissed.” Gün­ter Ger­hard Lange (1996)
• “To be blunt, and it is good advice to seri­ous new­com­ers: do not make the mis­take of being afraid to be labelled ‘con­ven­tional’, ‘tra­di­tional’, or any other such dusty term.” Fred Smei­jers, from Type Now: A Man­i­festo (2004)

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Lau­ren­Marie from Cre­ative­Cu­rio send in the fol­low­ing quotes:
• 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
• I am always doing that which I can­not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. Pablo Picasso
• Don’t worry about peo­ple steal­ing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats. Howard Aiken (not a designer, but rather the main guy behind IBM’s Har­vard Mark I com­puter. Still, this could apply to design!)

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Leon Pater­nos­ter, a teacher, designer and blog­ger send in the fol­low­ing quotes:
• Good design, at least part of the time, includes the cri­te­rion of being direct in rela­tion to the prob­lem at hand — not obscure, trendy, or styl­ish. A new lan­guage, visual or ver­bal, must be couched in a lan­guage that is already under­stood. Ivan Cher­may­eff
• Colour does not add a pleas­ant qual­ity to design — it rein­forces it. Pierre Bon­nard
• Com­mu­nica­tive gram­mar is gen­er­ally defined by con­trast, bal­ance, har­mony, and dis­tri­b­u­tion. Andy Rut­ledge
• The design process is essen­tially a process of sub­trac­tion, organ­i­sa­tion and empha­sis. Leon Pater­nos­ter
• Sim­pli­fy­ing design equates to reduc­ing the choices avail­able to the user to a few core, mean­ing­ful options. Leon Pater­nos­ter

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Adelle Charles from Fuel Your Cre­ativ­ity send in the fol­low­ing quote:
• “Good design­ers can cre­ate nor­malcy out of chaos; they can clearly com­mu­ni­cate ideas through the orga­niz­ing and manip­u­lat­ing of words and pic­tures.” Jef­fery Veen

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Erik Brandt designer & teacher at Min­neapo­lis Col­lege of Art and Design and blog­ger send in the fol­low­ing quote:
• For after all, a poster does more than sim­ply sup­ply infor­ma­tion on the goods it adver­tises; it also reveals a society’s state of mind.” No posters, no cul­ture? Armin Hoff­man
• “Among the few I have indi­cated, is there no dynamic man of action, the rebel who will help deter­mine the aspect of the col­lec­tive expres­sion of tomor­row? Pon­der this ques­tion and know that to make beau­ti­ful cre­ations for the sake of their aes­thetic value will have no social sig­nif­i­cance tomor­row, will be non-sensical self-gratification. Every era con­tains the con­di­tions for pro­vid­ing a rebel.” Piet Zwart

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Thank you all very much for send­ing in the quotes, highly appre­ci­ated! As DWP reader I would sug­gest check­ing out the web­sites of the fel­low blog­gers. Thanks again.

Share your favourite design quote?

Please let us know your favourite quote or share the quote of some­body that inspired you. Thank you in advance, look­ing for­ward read­ing your favourite design­ers quote!