Quotes About Design

For architects, towns and cities are just big display cases for their work. The fact that the place matters so much more than the building is something else they don't want to know. Making good cities is the last thing on their mind. As the heroic urbanist Jane Jacobs was heard to say, "the most cunningly ignorant people I know are architects.

they described how they were able to draw website visitors' attention to the goal of comfort merely by placing fluffy clouds on the background wallpaper of the site's

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.

A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well .

Typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn.

Type designers are, at their best, the Stradivarii of literature: not merely makers of salable products, but artists who design and make the instruments that other artists use.

When Nature her great masterpiece design'd,And fram'd her last, best work, the human mind,Her eye intent on all the mazy plan,She form'd of various stuff the various Man.

The first rule of functions is that they should be small. The second rule of functions is that they should be smaller than that.

SRP is one of the more important concept in OO design. It's also one of the simpler concepts to understand and adhere to. Yet oddly, SRP is often the most abused class design principle.

Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well-written prose. Clean code never obscures the designer's intent but rather is full of crisp abstractions and straightforward lines of control. - Grady Booch author of Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications

If a change to the requirements breaks your architecture, then your architecture sucks.

Duplication is the primary enemy of a well-designed system. It represents additional work, additional risk, and additional unnecessary complexity.

The unit tests are documents. They describe the lowest-level design of the system.

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. —Bjarne Stroustrup, 1991

The Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP) tells us that the most flexible systems are those in which source code dependencies refer only to abstractions, not to concretions.

Duplication is the primary enemy of a well-designed system.

Every system is built from a domain-specific language designed by the programmers to describe that system. Functions are the verbs of that language, and classes are the nouns.

if I must encode either the interface or the implementation, I choose the implementation. Calling it ShapeFactoryImp, or even the hideous CShapeFactory, is preferable to encoding the interface.

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture. —Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

Factories are a complexity that can often be avoided, especially in the early phases of an evolving design.

It is not enough for code to work. Code that works is often badly broken. Programmers who satisfy themselves with merely working code are behaving unprofessionally. They may fear that they don't have time to improve the structure and design of their code, but I disagree. Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code.

Software has two types of value: the value of its behavior and the value of its structure. The second of these is the greater of the two because it is this value that makes software soft.

Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change. —Grady Booch