Design quotes
2.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside design — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The principles of good human-to-computer interface design are simplicity, support, clarity, encouragement, satisfaction, accessibility, versatility, and personalization. While it’s essential to heed these, it’s also important to empathize with and inspire your audience so they feel you’re treating them less like a faceless user and more like a human being."
"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists-whether through design or stupidity, I do not know-as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups."
"When God designs to forgive us he changes our hearts and turns us to obedience by His Spirit."
"You wish to be great, begin from the least. You are thinking to construct some mighty fabric in height; first think of the foundation of humility. And how great soever a mass of building one may wish and design to place above it, the greater the building is to be, the deeper does he dig his foundation."
"The cardinal virtue of all beauty is restraint."
"If the world were clear, art would not exist."
"I have designs I like applied to my helmet, motorcycle, riding suits, gloves,and boots. I have a designer friend of mine put the designs on them for me. I think a livery on the helmet is significant in expressing a rider's personality."
"The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason-not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creators's design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random."
"Simplicity is the final achievement."
"Can you not see the numerous designs made by God as signs, similitudes, or analogies of resurrection? He has placed them in every era, the alteration of day and night, even in the coming and going of clouds."
"Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry"
"Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent."
"I don't think that design needs theory, but I think designers need theory."
"Good design is partially creativity and innovation, but primarily knowledge and awareness."
"What I'm trying to produce is the visual equivalent of the chord change that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up."
"You can analyse the past, but you need to design the future. That is the difference between suffering the future and enjoying it."
"We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe."
"The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty."
"The best design is the simplest one that works."
"Design is all about learning from doing, that’s how we evolve to the best solution."
