Quotes About Design

I think life's too complex to be an accident.

Decorating is a footnote to real life for me, a means to an end: Living well.

It is a paradox. Life is that way. God designed it that way. I believe I met him once. He was full of mischief.

Our role is to imagine products that don't exist and guide them to life.

Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?

This then is the scribe's direct purpose: the making of useful things legibly beautiful.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

The ultimate explanation is why we have two hands and ten fingers to start with, and why are we prone with them to do thus and so and not something else.

Timothy Beatley in Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning (2011)

Design cannot rescue failed content.

What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be "boiled down" and "simplified"? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information .

Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.

PowerPoint is like being trapped in the style of early Egyptian flatland cartoons rather than using the more effective tools of Renaissance visual representation.

Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.

If you tasked a cultural engineering team with designing a substance that would satisfy specs aimed at maximizing individual creativity and group cooperation, they would come up with something very much like alcohol.

Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design.

I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound - indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.

The minimum we should hope for with any display technology is that it should do no harm.

Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.

Comparisons must be enforced within the scope of the eyespan, a fundamental point occasionally forgotten in practice.

There will never be great architects or great architecture without great patrons.

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.

Life is a tapestry: We are the warp; angels, the weft; God, the weaver. Only the Weaver sees the whole design.

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.