Design Quotes

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.

When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back.

What other movement determines the S line? Its aesthetic efficacity has long been noted by artists.

Every action done by nature is done in the shortest way.

You can't just let nature run wild.

Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.

We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.

The Macintosh was supposed to be the computer for people that just wanted to use a computer without having to learn how to use one.

The greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous.

You have two choices: You can make a living, or you can design a life.

Car designers are just going to have to come up with an automobile that outlasts the payments.

Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.

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.

Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple or more practical than those of nature, because in her inventions there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous; and she makes use of no counterpoise when she constructs the limbs of animals in such a way as to correspond to the motion of their bodies, but she puts into them the soul of the body.

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

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.

Anyone who would argue that this third-generatio n MDX is an SUV might as well belong to the Flat Earth Society. The 2014 Acura MDX is the perfect expression of the modern car - capable, spacious, and friendly to drive.

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.

We've got to make the small things unforgettable.

The basically simple things are best, whether it's automobiles or diets or philosophy.

It's actually very difficult to make something both simple and good.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

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

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.

A life best lived is a life by design. Not by accident, and not by just walking through the day careening from wall to wall and managing to survive. That's okay. But if you can start giving your life dimensions and design and color and objectives and purpose, the results can be staggering.

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

After all the statistics and calculations are formulated, the one element that breathes life into marketing is good design.

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

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

If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird.

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.

The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

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

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Thirty spokes meet in the hub. Where a wheel isn't is where it's useful. Hollowed out, clay makes a pot. Where the pots not is where it's useful. Cut doors and windows to make a room. Where the room isn't, there's room for you. So the profit in what is, is in the use of what isn't.

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

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

Good designers copy; great designers steal.

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.

Clay is moulded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing. . . . Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognize the utility of what is not.

Make it like a sunflower.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

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

I believe that quality level is determined primarily by the actual design of the product itself, not by quality control in the production process.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

Fonts. I get emotional over fonts.

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

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.

Nothing is more consonant with Nature than that she puts into operation in the smallest detail that which she intends as a whole.

I became an art major, took every art class my school had to offer. In college, I majored in Advertising Art and Design.

Make it just like a Mac.

The artist in me cries out for design.

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.

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

If the elbow had been placed closer to the hand, the forearm would have been too short to bring the glass to the mouth; and if it had been closer to the shoulder, the forearm would have been so long that it would have carried the glass beyond the mouth.

I believe that bad taste is vulgar. It's like cursing. I think the world can be saved through design, because what is the most distasteful thing someone can do? Kill someone. So, good taste is the opposite of that.

The reason why most people face the future with apprehension instead of anticipation is because they don't have it well designed!

I have a dining room done in different shades of white, with white cushions embroidered in yellow silk: the effect is absolutely delightful and the room beautiful.

When you write a piece of software you assume a certain type of hardware. If you assume hardware that's too powerful then you can't sell many copies cause very few people have that machine. If you assume hardware that's too simple your product can't do as much.