Profoundly inspirational design quotes will challenge the way you think, change the way you live and transform your whole life.
Famous Design Quotes
Design’s fundamental role is problem solver. – Fast Company, 2005
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
Any good typeface can be completely destroyed when misused or extensively overused. – Alexander Gelman
Design is thinking made visual. – Saul Bass
It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good. – Paula Scher
The ultimate inspiration is the deadline. – Nolan Bushnell
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. – Hans Hofmann
Waste is a design flaw. – Kate Krebs
Do not seek praise, seek criticism. – Paul Arden
Effective problem solving in design requires a balance of strategy and spontaneity, intelligence and creativity. – Maggie Macnab
The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire and persistence. – Milton Glaser
Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. – Jan Tschichold
Designers may be the true intellectuals of the future. – Paola Antonelli
Design is intelligence made visible. – Alina Wheeler
Effective, meaningful design requires intellectual, rational rigor along with the ability to elicit emotions and beliefs. – Debbie Millman
Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages. – Steven Heller
Color does not add a pleasant quality to design—it reinforces it. – Pierre Bonnard
The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, empathize, synthesize and glean insight that enables him or her to make the invisible visible. – Hillman Curtis
The true entrepreneur is a risk taker, not an excuse maker. – VDEXTERS
Everything is designed, few things are designed well. – Brian Reed
A logo derives meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around. – Paul Rand
No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended. – Adrian Forty
Design is a solution to a problem; art is a question to a problem. – John Maeda
Design is a formal response to a strategic question. – Mariona Lopez
Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea wasn’t theirs. – Unknown
Good design is obvious, great design is transparent. – Joe Sparano
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works. – Steve Jobs
I am a graphic designer, not a miracle worker, I can’t make bad ideas look good. – Unknown
Design is where science and art break even. – Robin Mathew
Graphic designers judge a cover by its book. – Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. – Red Adair
Invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. – Thomas Edison
Good design is good business. – Thomas J. Watson Jr.
The only important thing about design is how it relates to people. – Victor Papanek
A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it. – Brenda Laurel
You are what you are seen to be. – Erik Spiekermann
To say that something is designed means it has intentions that go beyond its function. Otherwise it’s just planning. – Ayse Birsel
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
Truly elegant design incorporates top-notch functionality into a simple, uncluttered form. – David Lewis
Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others. – Orson Welles
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it. – Pablo Picasso
Design is as much a matter of finding problems as it is solving them. – Bryan Lawson
Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else. – Judy Garland
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away. – Tom Waits
Good art inspires; Good design motivates. – Otl Aicher
Color is a creative element, not a trimming. – Piet Zwart
Sometimes you can draw more inspiration from the people who don’t believe in you, then from the ones who do. – William Childs
Education is not the answer to the question. Education is the means to the answer to all questions. – William Allin
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 Philips
The definition of an expert is someone who knows what not to do. – Charles Willson
Practice safe design: Use a concept. – Petrula Vrontikis
Just because something looks good doesn’t mean it’s useful. And just because something is useful does not make it beautiful. – Joshua Brewer
Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere. – Mieke Gerritzen
When you eliminate quality as a requirement, the entire design process becomes a whole lot easier. – Jared M. Spool
If you’re more susceptible to interruption, you do more out of the box thinking. – Don Norman
By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback. – Kent Beck
You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt… or in front of a piece of graphic design. – Stefan Sagmeister
I don’t think that design needs theory, but I think designers need theory. – Johanna Drucker
Design is the contrast of the core of limitations therefore there are no boundaries. It is simply an interpretation of creativity. – Jenaiha Woods
Don’t worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop. – Jeffrey Zeldman
Simplicity does not mean want or poverty. It does not mean the absence of any decor, or absolute nudity. It only means that the decor should belong intimately to the design proper, and that anything foreign to it should be taken away. – Paul Jacques Grillo
I know the price of success: dedication, hard work & an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. – Frank Llyod Wright
Design is creativity with strategy. – Rob Curedale
There ain’t no rules around here. We’re trying to accomplish something. – Thomas Edison
Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up. – Tate Linden
Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty. – Emil Ruder
Wisdom is to knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it. – David Starr
Designers have a dual duty; contractually to their clients and morally to the later users and recipients of their work. – Hans Hger
Imitation may be thesincerest form of plagiarism, but it is also the mark of an inferior person. – David Ogilvy
Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see. – Paul Klee
Some designers create things to show you what they did. I design things to tell you what I solved. – Brian Yerkes
The quality of any creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge. – John Gruber
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. – Leonardo da Vinci
The secret of joy in work is contained in one word: excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it. – Pearl S. Buck
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
The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before. – Neil Gaiman
Designing a product is designing a relationship. – Steve Rogers
I don’t design clothes, I design dreams. – Ralph Lauren
Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose. – Charles Eames
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. – Pablo Picasso
I never design a building before I’ve seen the site and met the people who will be using it. – Frank Lloyd Wright
If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got. A– lbert Einstein
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. – Steve Jobs
There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. If something is cluttered and/or confusing, fix your design. – Edward Tufte
Less is more. – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions. – Pablo Picasso
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. – Steve Jobs
