• Topic: Design
• Tags: Design, quotes
• Publish date: December 8th, 2008
  
• By: Sander Baumann
• Comments: {49 appreciated comments, please join and share your thoughts.}

Beautiful and inspiring Designers Quotes

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!

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