Design Quotes For Inspiration

"Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated."
—Paul Rand

"Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun."—Mary Lou Cook

"Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless."—Jamie Paolinetti

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.

— Joe Sparano

Every designers’ dirty little secret is that they copy other designers’ work. They see work they like, and they imitate it. Rather cheekily, they call this inspiration.

— Aaron Russell



Visual design is often the polar opposite of engineering: trading hard edges for subjective decisions based on gut feelings and personal experiences. It’s messy, unpredictable, and notoriously hard to measure. The apparently erratic behavior of artists drives engineers bananas. Their decisions seem arbitrary and risk everything with no guaranteed benefit.

— Scott Stevenson

 

Design is the search for a magical balance between business and art; art and craft; intuition and reason; concept and detail; playfulness and formality; client and designer; designer and printer; and printer and public.

— Valerie Pettis

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

— Edward Tufte

Design trends online change more often than the wind, and slightly less often than my socks. — Suleiman Leadbitter

People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.

— Paola Antonelli

Design is about making things good (and then better) and right (and fantastic) for the people who use and encounter them.
— Matt Beale

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
— Steve JobsI love the comment, “You must love designing for a living.” At that point I usually start to laugh or break into uncontrollable tears.
— Andrew LewisThe dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.
— Tom Peters
Design is a means toward accomplishing the end goals of serving markets and generating profits. Furthermore, design is an element in social responsibility. Good design allows “form to complement performance.” The way things look is not irrelevant to the way things work: how they work is how they should look.
— Thomas F. SchutteArt is like masturbation. It is selfish and introverted and done for you and you alone. Design is like sex. There is someone else involved, their needs are just as important as your own, and if everything goes right, both parties are happy in the end.
— Colin WrightA design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.
— Brenda Laurel

Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea wasn’t theirs.— Frank Chimero
Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.— Orson Welles
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.— Antoine de Saint Exupéry
No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended.
— Adrian FortyThe only important thing about design is how it relates to people.
— Victor Papanek

Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity
— John Carmack

    Designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organising and manipulating of words and pictures
—Jeffrey Veen

    Graphic designers are idea embalmers. loving undertakers preserving bits of data like so many butterflies pinned to felt in a jewel box
— Paul Saffo

    To create a memorable design you need to start with a thought that’s worth remembering
—Thomas Manss

    Graphic designers are, by and large selfish and spoiled. They stubbornly control and individually design things that are generally smaller than them, perfecting to a level appreciated only by people like them. They don’t share and play well with others
—Wayne Hunt

    A computer without Photoshop is like a dog with no legs. Sure is fun, but you can’t really do anything with it—Benjamin Cavanagh

    Design is creativity with strategy
—Rob Curedale

    Good ideas turn into good designs fairly quickly. If you catch yourself fiddling too much with colors, borders and treatments to bring a design together, chances are the problem lies somewhere deeper—Ryan Singer

    A designer who gives her art away, makes no pay, A designer who keeps her art to herself, makes no friends
—Amber Seree Allen

    Being a graphic designer gets you used to rejection of your brilliance. So it’s good practice for dating
—Heather Phillips

    Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should always say, “Look at this”—David Craib