Quotes About Design

Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

In its heyday, the car was an expression of technical flair and design genius: the original Mini, the Beetle, the 2CV, and the Fiat 500 were all, in their various ways, inspired incarnations of functionality.

In the building of a basic wardrobe, we cannot go wrong if we strive for simplicity and perfect fitting.

A product can live on one great idea. An interior needs 1,000 great ideas to really live, which makes interior design a whole orchestration of this art of juxtaposition, placement, and combination.

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. 'The client made me do this.' 'The city made me do this.' 'Oh, the budget.' I don't believe that anymore.

The world is filled with archaic objects - mailboxes which look like alarm boxes, banks which look like places to break out of rather than places to enter.

Always have a plan, and believe in it. Nothing happens by accident.

I now have a plan - I haven't had a plan up until this year.

The architect must get to know the people who will live in the planned house. From their needs, the rest inevitably follows.

I'm a huge planner, more and more so as the years go by.

Planning cities is a necessary but risky business.

It is a process of finding the right music then planning a costume to fit that style of music.

I'm never not planning for my future house. Most of the files on my laptop are devoted to different rooms in my dream house. I'm embarrassing.

I've been on lots of movies where we've done a lot of planning of sets - how much you build, and is this big enough, and will this get us what we need? - just with foam-core models.

Planning a garden, park, building, or city shouldn't be done in an office.

I believe in planning logics where you have neighbourhoods, and you don't just do one building at a time.

If I thought about planning, I'd plan movies. If I thought about planning my life, I'd plan my life more rationally, not like New Yorkers who live their lives so irrationally, without reason. Maybe that's the connection between my movies and New York: the movies have the same kind of lack of overall design.

Now, after the Cube, I still don't have any plans to make anything like it.

I don't usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren't yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn't look great as a model?

In short order, Obamacare is evolving into a Medicaid marketplace. Not only in terms of the design and quality of the narrow-network plans that are being offered, but in the actual carriers that sell those policies.

Most people want things that are light and bright - open floor plans, light cabinets - things they won't get sick of quickly.

Break the rules - put a plant or a floral arrangement in a room that you wouldn't expect!

I've got my organic veg patch and fruit; we're very garden-obsessed, my husband and I. He designed a garden for me for Christmas, so beautiful! Alasdhair's very good at the proportion and ground work, and I come in and do the planting and the color scheme.