#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 This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.”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.”

“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.”