Quotes on Design

Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does.

Design has to work. Art does not.

The idea of sustainability can imply there is one perfect, unchanging future, if only we could work out how to get there. Resilience might be more useful, in that it assumes a dynamic environment and that perfection is impossible. You need to design systems to accommodate failure rather than eliminate it. By trying to be perfect, many visions of sustainability are quite brittle

A good design is not a democratic consensus.

I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control.

To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need.

I don't design. I get what I think is a big idea, and I put the idea down. I'm not a designer. I'm a communicator.

The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.

No amount of rationalizing can change God's laws. No amount of fashion designing can turn immodesty into virtue, and no amount of popularity can change sin into righteousness.

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration.

I think when people have the freedom to tell their own story rather than trying to be specific to a certain design or style, there's more freedom, and it ends up feeling more like home. Those spaces we see in magazines and on the Internet are beautiful, but if there's not that story there, then it's going to lack that feeling of home.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment.

Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they're made. So, for example, scientists didn't go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we're still finding things for a laser to do.

Logos are a graphic extension of the internal realities of a company.

I don't want to end my career and then start something. I like to do something while my career is still hot and I've always enjoyed designing.

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.

People who love ideas must have a love of words. They will take a vivid interest in the clothes that words wear.

Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.

To grasp organizational life as it is, read novels (!) .... It is my fervent belief that we will never design rational processes that "overcome" such irregularities-don't bother telling that to a consultant. Hence, we should embrace the real, nonrational, nonlinear world with vigor and glee-and develop enterprise and career strategies accordingly.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.