Quotes About Design

Under the Re-Invention Paradigm, instead of your word fitting the world, you design your promise as a "world-to-word" fit. You have the world lined up, to fit the promise you have made.

If you can, you can then take risks without "violating" this carefully tended structure of meaning. You can put all of your life at stake, in the service of whatever "designated impossibility" is important to you, because you know all of your life, to date, is meaningless.

In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were.

I have been wildly enthused about gaming since I was younger, and a career path I chose not to go down but did really consider was getting into programming and game design.

The shabby look was not his tailor's fault; the Arab's body was not designed for clothes requiring posture and discipline.

I got into this little habit of architecture and building. I designed a house in Colorado and one in Hawaii. The idea is supposed to be build and sell - but then I can never bring myself to sell them.

And whoever it was … was planning a murder.

But you're still better company than the pigeons. All they want to talk about is nest design and who to poop on.

Will there be a Gen5 series of Glocks?

A single-stack Glock could come close, but even if Glock did it, probably not.

in matches. He pioneered the matted slide and the frenched borders on 1911s. Now, the look of an honest-to-goodness

architecture is there, presenting itself to us even when we do not seek it out or even choose to be conscious of it

So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they'll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It's hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it's hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.

When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's form follows function, what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives.

GOOD DESIGN IS SIMPLE. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers, it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament.

The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good.

Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion.

Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design. If you don't know where your ideas are coming from, you're probably imitating an imitator.

In practice I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something they thought ugly.

If you start a startup, don't design your product to please VCs or potential acquirers. Design your product to please the users. If you win the users, everything else will follow.

think language designers would do better to consider their target user to be a genius who will need to do things they never anticipated, rather than a bumbler who needs to be protected from himself. The bumbler will shoot himself in the foot anyway.

It would be pretty easy to write a better word processor than Microsoft Word, for example, but Microsoft, within the castle of their operating system monopoly, probably wouldn't even notice if you did. The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That's where you can win

hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers. What else can painting teach us about hacking?

I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots.