Design Quotes

“Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.”

“The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.”

“There is in nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and makes it available. This methodizing mind meets no resistance in its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a symmetrical structure, fit. This design following after finds with joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row, but things belong in a row.”

“Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.”

“The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.”

“You can't just let nature run wild.”

“I just want it to look like nothing else in the world. And it should be surrounded by a train.”

“Make your life a masterpiece: Step beyond the demands of the moment and begin right now to design and live the life you deserve.”

“I want to design jewelry for girls and guys... I'ma spread it out, but I'ma design, probably when I'm just designing furniture and buildings, I'll probably being the jewelry thing, too.”

“I'm not into fashion, but I like design. I wear the same shoes every day.”

“In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.”

“What would a chair look like if your knees bent the other way?”

“Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.... I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.... It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.”

“When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop... But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem - and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.”

“We've gone through the operating system and looked at everything and asked how can we simplify this and make it more powerful at the same time.”

“The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.”

“The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

“I put hardwood floors on top of wall-to-wall carpet.”

“Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”

“We've got to make the small things unforgettable.”

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.”

“Make it like a sunflower.”

“The real art is knowing what to leave out, not what to put in.”

“It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.”

“A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”