Quotes About Design

My learning process is by eye alone it's not at all scientific.

And I have dreamed of the morning coming in like a bird through the window not burdened by a thought, —Wendell Berry, from "The Design of The House: Ideal and Hard Time," New Collected Poems (Counterpoint Press, 2012)

When the social groups involved in designing and using technology decide that a problem is solved, they stabilize the technology. The result is closure. Closure and stabilization, however, are not isolated events; they occur repeatedly during technological development. To

chariots that I would design with

In reality," said Democritus, "there are only atoms and the void." Perception is due to the expulsion of atoms from the object upon the sense organ. There is or have been or will be an infinite number of worlds; at every moment planets are colliding and dying, and new worlds are rising out of chaos by the selective aggregation of atoms of similar size and shape. There is no design; the universe is a machine. This

What a strange instrument a tuba is. I wonder how many different shapes they twisted that metal into until they realized that a tuba's shape was the exact one they needed to make that exact sound.

true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing;

few stray bits of Lego

The switch on Damien's Italian floor lamp feels alien: a different click, designed to hold back a different voltage

Art Nouveau was coil-envy.

Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape

You can be the architect of moments that matter.

Our struggles with e-mail are a bit pathetic, but the larger topic is worth considering: Is it possible to design an environment in which undesired behaviors—whether yours or your colleagues'—are made not only harder but impossible? As it turns out, lots of people actually make their living contemplating how to wipe out the wrong kinds of behaviors.

The project often feels like a failure in the middle. But if the team persists through this valley of angst and doubt, it eventually emerges with a growing sense of momentum. Team members begin to test out their new designs, and they realize the improvements they've made, and they keep tweaking the design to make it better. And they come to realize, we've cracked this problem. That's when the team reaches the peak of confidence.

One of IDEO's designers even sketched out a "project mood chart" that predicts how people will feel at different phases of a project. It's a U-shaped curve with a peak of positive emotion, labeled "hope," at the beginning, and a second peak of positive emotion, labeled "confidence," at the end. In between the two peaks is a negative emotional valley labeled "insight.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Commercial Art tries to make you buy things. Graphic Design gives you ideas.

A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku of the story.

Kiddies, Graphic Design, if you wield it effectively, is Power. Power to transmit ideas that change everything. Power that can destroy an entire race or save a nation from despair. In this century, Germany chose to do the former with the swastika, and America opted for the latter with Mickey Mouse and Superman.

Graphic Design for its own sake will never happen, because the concept cancels itself out — a poster about nothing other than itself is not Graphic Design, it's … makin' ART.

But at the end of the day, you can't major in Making Stuff, so it was Art by default.

Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take.

It's not Art. And Art is not Design.

Penguin Classic, with the orange bands at the top and bottom; and the Gill Sans thirty-sixpoint title, all caps, centered and medium weight, in black on the white band in the middle. One of the designer Tschichold's prouder moments, when he finally woke the hell up and joined the twentieth century.