Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.

— Charles Eames

Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.

— Brian Reed

There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.

— Massimo Vignelli

People ignore design that ignores people.

— Frank Chimero

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

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.

— Joe Sparano

Every designers’ dirty little secret is that they copy other designers’ work. They see work they like, and they imitate it. Rather cheekily, they call this inspiration.

— Aaron Russell

The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong.

— Marty Neumeier

Visual design is often the polar opposite of engineering: trading hard edges for subjective decisions based on gut feelings and personal experiences. It’s messy, unpredictable, and notoriously hard to measure. The apparently erratic behavior of artists drives engineers bananas. Their decisions seem arbitrary and risk everything with no guaranteed benefit.

— Scott Stevenson

Design is where science and art break even.

— Robin Mathew

Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere.

— Mieke Gerritzen

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.

— Bruno Munari

Design is the application of intent - the opposite of happenstance, and an antidote to accident.

— Robert L. Peters

Design is the search for a magical balance between business and art; art and craft; intuition and reason; concept and detail; playfulness and formality; client and designer; designer and printer; and printer and public.

— Valerie Pettis

Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should always say, “Look at this.”

— David Craib

Bad design is smoke, while good design is a mirror.

— Juan-Carlos Fernàndez

Don’t design for everyone. It’s impossible. All you end up doing is designing something that makes everyone unhappy.

— Leisa Reichelt

Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.

— Ellen Lupton

The design process, at its best, integrates the aspirations of art, science, and culture.

— Jeff Smith

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

— Edward Tufte

Design is intelligence made visible.

— Alina Wheeler

Math is easy; design is hard.

— Jeffrey Veen

Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order.

— Victor Papanek

Design trends online change more often than the wind, and slightly less often than my socks.

— Suleiman Leadbitter

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

— Jeffrey Zeldman

People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.

— Paola Antonelli

Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.

— Tate Linden

Design is not the narrow application of formal skills, it is a way of thinking.

— Chris Pullman

Designers are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

— Fabien Barral

Design is about making things good (and then better) and right (and fantastic) for the people who use and encounter them.

— Matt Beale

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

— Steve Jobs

I’m convinced that without bad design, the world would be a far less stimulating place; we would have nothing to marvel over and nothing to be nostalgic about.

— Carrie Phillips

Behavioral design is all about feeling in control. Includes: usability, understanding, but also the feel.

— Don Norman

Good design must be defined by appropriateness to audience and goals, and by its effectiveness, not by its adherence to Swiss design or the number of awards it wins.

— Drew Davies

Being a famous designer is like being a famous dentist.

— Noreen Morioka

Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.

— Robert L. Peters

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

You can’t do better design with a computer, but you can speed up your work enormously.

— Wim Crouwel

I love the comment, “You must love designing for a living.” At that point I usually start to laugh or break into uncontrollable tears.

— Andrew Lewis

The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.

— Tom Peters

Designers have a dual duty; contractually to their clients and morally to the later users and recipients of their work.

— Hans Höger

Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.

— Milton Glaser

I find modernist design boring, but it so much faster!

— Christine Suewon Lee

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

— Douglas Adams

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

— Sir Alec Issigonis

A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is.

— Leo Frankowski

For me, design is like choosing what I’m going to wear for the day - only much more complicated and not really the same at all.

— Robynne Raye

Design is a means toward accomplishing the end goals of serving markets and generating profits. Furthermore, design is an element in social responsibility. Good design allows “form to complement performance.” The way things look is not irrelevant to the way things work: how they work is how they should look.

— Thomas F. Schutte

Art is like masturbation. It is selfish and introverted and done for you and you alone. Design is like sex. There is someone else involved, their needs are just as important as your own, and if everything goes right, both parties are happy in the end.

— Colin Wright

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

I would show my my jobs to my mother, and she would always say the same thing: “That’s nice dear.” And then she would say, “Did you write it?” or “Did you do the drawing?” or “Did you take the pictures?” I’d always answer “no,” then I realized the problem. My answer was then, “I made this happen. It’s called design.”

— Brian Webb

Most [clients] expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.

— Dan Brown

Technology over technique produces emotionless design.

— Daniel Mall

I think design covers so much more than the aesthetic. Design is fundamentally more. Design is usability. It is Information Architecture. It is Accessibility. This is all design.

— Mark Boulton

A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.

— Brenda Laurel/p>

The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.

— Massimo Vignelli

If design isn’t profitable, then it’s art.

— Henrik Fiskar

Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea wasn’t theirs.

— Frank Chimero

A well-designed text will seem weightless after a time; the initial feel of the book fades away as the mind becomes engrossed in the words.

— Mandy Brown

Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does.

— David Carson

The difference between a Designer and Developer, when it comes to design skills, is the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.

— Scott Hanselman

Practice safe design: Use a concept.

— Petrula Vrontikis

Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

— Orson Welles

Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.

— Raymond Loewy

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

Truly elegant design incorporates top-notch functionality into a simple, uncluttered form.

— David Lewis

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

— Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.

— Chris Bangle

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

— Steve Jobs

At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism.

— Erik Adigard

To say that something is designed means it has intentions that go beyond its function. Otherwise it’s just planning.

— Ayse Birsel

— Ivan Chermayeff

No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended.

— Adrian Forty

Many things difficult to design prove easy to perform.

— Samuel Johnson

The designer is a visually literate person, just as an editor is expected by training and inclination to be versed in language and literature, but to call the former an artist by occupation is as absurd as to refer to the latter as a poet.

— Douglas Martin

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

Design is easy. All you do is stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead.

— Marty Neumeier

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

— Victor Papanek

Our opportunity, as designers, is to learn how to handle the complexity, rather than shy away from it, and to realize that the big art of design is to make complicated things simple.

— Tim Parsey

The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. He new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.

— Paul Rand

Art is an idea that has found its perfect visual expression. And design is the vehicle by which this expression is made possible. Art is a noun, and design is a noun and also a verb. Art is a product and design is a process. Design is the foundation of all the arts.

— Paul Rand

Designing a product is designing a relationship.

— Steve Rogers

It is easy to fail when designing an interactive experience. Designers fail when they do not know the audience, integrate the threads of content and context, welcome the public properly, or make clear what the experience is and what the audience’s role in it will be.

— Edwin Schlossberg

Good design is good business.

— Thomas J. Watson Jr.

Great design will not sell an inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential.

— Thomas J. Watson Jr.

…designers can make life more bearable by producing stuff that touches its audience rather than fucks them in the head.

— Jon Wozencraft

Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.

— Erik Adigard

I never design a building before I’ve seen the site and met the people who will be using it.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

The fundamental failure of most graphic, product, architectural, and even urban design is its insistence on serving the God of Looking-Good rather than the God of Being-Good.

— Richard Saul Wurman