Explore Quotes on Design

Design is the patterning and planning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end... any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself works, counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life.

Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.

A man-made thing that produces pleasure (and criticism) by somehow taping into the order of the universe is beautiful. Making beautiful things makes our lives worthwhile. My teacher, and one of the founders of the Pratt industrial design program, Rowena Reed Kostellow, said, "Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization." From a pragmatic point of view, for something to be beautiful, it has to work. In order to make this idea clearer I have combined the ideas of beauty and function into one word: Beautility.

The essential function of the (design) profession in our society is to enhance and cultivate communications toward: Easier understanding of ideas and complex problems, in the shortest possible time and higher visual and auditory retention of data.

Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure. The intention is to really carve out of a city civic spaces and the more it is accessible to a much larger mass in public and it's about people enjoying that space. That makes life that much better. If you think about housing, education, whether schools and hospitals, these are all very interesting projects because in the way you interpret this special experience.

Design is... above all an effort to improve reality... I always try to begin with considerations of its function... I ask myself, who needs it, which materials best suit its functions and so on.

Now architecture consists of order, which in Greek is called taxis ... Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and, as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result.

Design is the fundamental creative activity with which we direct our lives, and collectively, the earth's transformation from its original, natural state into our human-made world.

With function, flow, and form as basis, design is evaluated as a process culminating in an entity which intensifies comprehension.

The reality of the final moment, just before shooting [the scene], is so powerful that all previous analysis must yield before the impressions you receive under these circumstances, and unless you use this feedback to your positive advantage, unless you adjust to it, adapt to it and accept the sometimes terrifying weaknesses it can expose, you can never realize the most out of your film.

Repetition is the death of magic.

Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does. Go look outside. You can't tell me that we are done making the world.

Feeling creative produces great work in approximately the same way that "feeling like a doctor" makes you a gifted thoracic surgeon.

If design is to be ecologically responsible, it must be independent of concern for the gross national product.

I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don't give a damn whether the client understands that that's worth anything, or that the client thinks it's worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It's worth it to me. It's the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.

Do not seek to change what has come before. Seek to create that which has not

Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy's habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place or product.

It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.

Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order

If you don't talk to your customers, how will you know how to talk to your customers?

Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.