Quotes on Design

Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.

Be the designer of your own destiny.

Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.

Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form.

Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not static like cutouts; sooner or later they change shape, leading to misunderstanding, loneliness and loss of love.

A good man is willing to know the worst of himself, and particularly under affliction, desires to be told wherefore God contends with him and what God designs in correcting him.

Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty.

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.

EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.

[The] dynamics of computational artifacts extend beyond the interface narrowly defined, to relations of people with each other and to the place of computing in their ongoing activities. System design, it follows, must include not only the design of innovative technologies, but their artful integration with the rest of the social and material world.

You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.