Top 100 Best Quotes
Learning Web Design is like playing video games: You start small and build your character as you progress, then you beat the boss, literally.
- Ricardo Zea
When is the last time you saw a Lamborghini sale?
- Chris Campbell
A picture is worth a thousand dollars.
- Marty Neumeier
The challenge is for the graphic designer to turn data into information and information into messages of meaning.
- Katherine McCoy
People ignore design that ignores people.
- Frank Chimero
Bad design is smoke, while good design is a mirror.
- Juan-Carlos Fernandez
Designing for clients that don’t appreciate the value of design is like buying new tires for a rental car.
- Joel Fisher
A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures.
- Ben Shneiderman
All the magic, be it in code or design, starts with a clear mind, pen and a blank paper.
- Brian Wangila
Design is content with intent. Content without intent is noise. Intent without content is decoration.
- Joe Sparano
Design is a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.
- Erik Adigard
Once you eliminate quality as a requirement, the entire design process becomes a whole lot easier.
- Jared M. Spool
If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got.
- Albert Einstein
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
- William Butler Yeats
A good designer finds an elegant way to put everything you need on a page. A great designer convinces you half that shit is unnecessary.
- Mike Monteiro
Be stimulated by rejection.
- Bob Gill
My adventure has all been in my mind. The great adventure has been thinking. I love to think about things. I think that the lack of drama in my life has produced a platform for me to be fundamentally adventurous in my thinking.
- Milton Glaser
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
- C.A.R. Hoare
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
Creative thinking may mean simply the realization that there’s no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done.
- Davey Coleman
Passion, dedication, and silly lists of what designers need are what designers need.
- Arman Nobari
This is our job as designers – to continue making decisions until the purpose of the design is perfectly clear. Then you are done.
- Terry Acker
Practicality is the serial killer of dreams.
- Rasha Hamdan
Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.
- Stella Adler
The designer is not always right. The researcher is not always wrong. Profit is not always the motive; market research, whatever its outcome, should never be used as a good excuse for bad design – in the same sense that good design should never be used to promote a bad product.
- Paul Rand
A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.
- Bruno Munari
That’s why pro bono work is great. You choose to do it, and if you’re choosing to do it to grow your own work, your deal is essentially that you’re not going to collaborate. You’re going to do the job the way you think the job is gonna be done.
- Paula Scher
For those who would argue that it’s impossible to evaluate designs without real content, let me ask this: why then, is it okay to evaluate content out of context of the designs?
- Karen McGrane
What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult – that is, revelation of the complex.
- Edward Tufte
If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.
- Ralf Speth
To create anything–whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom–is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.
- Tom Bissel
You don’t have to be “a creative” to be creative.
- Drory Ben-Menachem
When you’re passionate about what you do, you become an evangelist for the very thing you do.
- Jonathan Snook
Write it down. You will lose thoughts, you thought, that you thought.
- Vanessa Workoff
They enjoy giving form to ideas. If designers were made of ideas, they’d be their own clients.
- Rudy VanderLans
Have you ever tried multiplying roman numerals? It’s incredibly, ridiculously difficult. That’s why, before the 14th century, everyone thought that multiplication was an incredibly difficult concept, and only for the mathematical elite. Then Arabic numerals came along, with their nice place values, and we discovered that even seven-year-olds can handle multiplication just fine. There was nothing difficult about the concept of multiplication—the problem was that numbers, at the time, had a bad user interface.
- Bret Victor
Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is.
- Chip Kidd
It takes the same amount of effort to make bad art as to make good art, and you won’t know which you’ve made until you release it into the wild. You can continue to refine a work until it doesn’t set off your own quality alarms, but that’s no guarantee that what you’ve made will touch anybody.
- Nate Simpson
People don’t use a product because of the great design; great design helps them use the product.
- Viran Anuradha Dayaratne
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
- Walker Evans
Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It’s simple, it’s elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it’s got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open – and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful.
- Marissa Mayer
When we engage in what we are naturally suited to do, our work takes on the quality of play and it is play that stimulates creativity.
- Linda Naiman
Typography is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters.
- Steve Byers
If your UI even vaguely resembles an airplane cockpit, you’re doing it wrong.
- John Gruber
Write it down. You will lose thoughts, you thought, that you thought.
- Vanessa Workoff
Once the problem was stated, its solution came to me in a flash.
- Anton Fokker
Sometimes you can draw more inspiration from the people who don’t believe in you, then from the ones who do.
- William Childs
The difference between a weed and a flower is a judgement.
- Wayne Dyer
What’s the hardest thing to communicate? The hardest thing is to communicate.
- Michael Cina
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
One paints with one’s head, not one’s hand.
- Michalangelo
There is a very fine line between stupid and clever.
- David St. Hubbins
Do, or do not. There is no “try”.
- Yoda
Everything we do communicates.
- Pete Episcopo
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you’re not that good. You just reached the level here. I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.
- Quentin Tarantino
There are too many elements on most web pages to affix or align each one to the baseline grid. Doing so would require a mathematical rigor that, if it can be achieved, might produce rationally exact measurements and placements but will most likely be something less than elegant. The result would be a design driven by math, rather than a design that uses math to create an elegant product.
- Khoi Vinh
Ideas trump aesthetics. Convenience trumps UI. Content trumps platforms.
- Marc-Oliver Gern
The value, and especially the legitimization of design will be, in the future, measured more in terms of how it can enable us to survive… on this planet.
- Dieter Rams
If it sounds good, you’ll hear it. If it looks good, you’ll see it. If it’s marketed right, you’ll buy it. But if it’s real, you’ll feel it.
- Kid Rock
Designers deal in ideas. They give shape to ideas that shape our world, enrich everyday experiences, and improve our lives. Where there’s confusion, designers fashion clarity; where there’s chaos, designers construct order; where there’s entropy, designers promote vitality; where there’s indifference, designers swell passion; where there’s mediocrity, designers imbue excellence; and where there’s silence, designers lend voice.
- Ken Peters
Designing something is like having a baby. Asking me to try another design once I’ve birthed something amazing is like asking me to put the baby back in the womb and try again. That never works out for anyone.
- Chad McMillan
Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.
- Robert L. Peters
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
- Frank Zappa
Today’s designers and illustrators are synthesizing the best elements from past eras of graphic design to create a new visual language with a reduced and rational approach.
- R. Klanten, H. Hellige
Letterspacing creates speedbumps for the reader.
- Michael Stinson
A designer who gives her art away, makes no pay. A designer who keeps her art to herself, makes no friends.
- Amber Seree Allen
It is not easy to know what you like. Most people fool themselves their entire lives about this. Self-acquaintance is a rare condition.
- Robert Henri
Designers deal in ideas. They give shape to ideas that shape our world, enrich everyday experiences, and improve our lives. Where there’s confusion, designers fashion clarity; where there’s chaos, designers construct order; where there’s entropy, designers promote vitality; where there’s indifference, designers swell passion; where there’s mediocrity, designers imbue excellence; and where there’s silence, designers lend voice.
- Ken Peters
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
I’m convinced that without bad design, the world would be a far less stimulating place; we would have nothing to marvel over and nothing to be nostalgic about.
- Carrie Phillips
Design to communicate, not just decorate.
- Tony Stanton
It is not easy to know what you like. Most people fool themselves their entire lives about this. Self-acquaintance is a rare condition.
- Robert Henri
What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful…
- Michelle Obama
There’s no duo more passionate than the design and me.
- Gonxalo Blanco
I think design would be better if designers were much more skeptical about its applications. If you believe in the potency of your craft, where you choose to dole it out is not something to take lightly.
- Frank Chimero
When typography is on point, words become images.
- Shawn Lukas
Wonderfully designed > beautifully designed. Any day.
- Daniel Burka
Wondering is the seed of genius.
- William Mocca
Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.
- Robert L. Peters
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
- Frank Capra
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.
- Howard Thurman
You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.
- Henry Ford
A portfolio as pretty as pictures is nothing but a tip of the iceberg, the real treasure underlies the ocean.
- Shawn Lukas
One of the most significant differences between graphic designers and other visual artists is our unhinged love of typography.
- Greg Breeding
We read best what we read most.
- Zuzana Licko
Good designs come from the heart, not from the brain.
- Danny Sengers
Urban public space is a stage for viewing the field of graphic design in its diversity. A mix of voices, from advertising to activism, compete for visibility.
- Ellen Lupton
If everyone likes your design, it’s banal. Mediocrity shirks offense. Art dares it.
- Jeffrey Zeldman
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
I try not to think out of the box anymore, but on its edge, its corner, its flap, and under its bar code.
- Clint Runge
To clarify, add detail. Imagine that, to clarify, add detail. Clutter and overload are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design.
- Edward Tufte
Here’s how we work. Somebody calls up with a project; we do some stuff; and the money follows.
- Tim Brennan
The difference between a Designer and Developer, when it comes to design skills, is the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.
- Scott Hanselman
If you’re more susceptible to interruption, you do more out of the box thinking.
- Don Norman
Design is about making things good (and then better) and right (and fantastic) for the people who use and encounter them.
- Matt Beale
Even large companies need small logos.
- Tanner Christensen
Simplicity will stand out, while complexity will get lost in the crowd.
- Kevin Barnett
Creativity is a habit. It’s not something that happens in the shower.
- Nick Law
Learning never exhausts the mind.
- Leonardo da Vinci
