Design Quotes

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication-- Steve Jobs turned this into the slogan behind an early Mac advertising campaign. Which doesn't make it less true.”

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

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

“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.”

“In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.”

“That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex.”

“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.”

“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 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 artist in me cries out for design.”

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

“Choose a checked or striped wall paper. People will be halfway home before they are able to focus.”

“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.”

“Good designers copy; great designers steal.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Art is to be free. Design is to fix.”

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

“Fonts. I get emotional over fonts.”