11 Design Quotes

I enjoy reading quotes—interesting lines of words that hit precisely something that may take an essay to explain otherwise. The quotes I like are the ones that after reading they immediately change my way of thinking, question it, or simplify it. Below are 11 quotes of such a nature.

“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
—Ayn Rand

“If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page… When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.”
—Adrian Frutiger

“I’ve always held to the belief that the practice of creating compelling graphic design occurs not by employing the principals of a democracy, but rather, that of a monarchy.”
—Thomas Vasquez

“The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong.”
—Marty Neumeier

“Design should never say, ‘Look at me.’ It should always say, ‘Look at this.'”
—David Craib

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs

“It’s art if can’t be explained. It’s fashion if no one asks for an explanation. It’s design if it doesn’t need explanation.”
—Wouter Stokkel

“A camel is a horse designed by a committee.”
—Sir Alec Issigonis

“Many desperate acts of design (including gradients, drop shadows, and the gratuitous use of transparency) are perpetuated in the absence of a strong concept. A good idea provides a framework for design decisions, guiding the work.”
—Noreen Morioka

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
—Eliel Saarinen

“Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all. Everyone makes design decisions all the time without realizing it—like Moliere’s M. Jourdain who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life—and good design is simply the result of making these decisions consciously, at the right stage, and in consultation with others as the need arises.”
— Douglas Martin