100+ Inspiring Quotes About Design

Design is everywhere! You just have to keep your eyes open. Designers are demi-gods but we are humans, a designer gets up on fine morning with a creative block in his/her head. It can happen to the best of us. Inspiration can be found in a magazine, nature, and yes even in trashbox.  Here are some inspiring design quotes to inspire you to keep your creative juice flowing. And to the creative heads who want to add their own quotes please share it with our readers in the comment section. You never know you might be featured in a list like this amongst the best of designers. Also Check out: 70+ Super Creative Wallpapers About Design.

Design is intelligence made visible.

~Don Newgren

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

~Steve Jobs

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

~David Craib

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

People ignore design that ignores people.

~Frank Chimero

The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire and persistence.

~Milton Glaser

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

Math is easy; design is hard.

~Jeffrey Veen

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

Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader. The good type-designer therefore realizes that, for a new fount to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty.

~Stanley Morrison

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

~Juan-Carlos Fernàndez

Practice safe design: Use a concept.

~Petrula Vrontikis

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

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

~Massimo Vignelli

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

~Orson Welles

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

~Leisa Reichelt

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

~Marty Neumeier

Waste is a design flaw.

~Kate Krebs

Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era – it’s a process that creates order out of chaos, that renders technology usable to business. Design means being good, not just looking good.

~Clement Mok

Only when the design fails does it draw attention to itself; when it succeeds, it’s invisible.

~John D. Berry

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

Design is the contrast of the core of limitations therefore there are no boundaries. It is simply an interpretation of creativity.

~Jenaiha Woods

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

~Raymond Loewy

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

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

~Ellen Lupton

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

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

~Sir Alec Issigonis

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 behaviour of artists drives engineers bananas. Their decisions seem arbitrary and risk everything with no guaranteed benefit.

~Scott Stevenson

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

~David Lewis

To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.

~Milton Glaser

If there were a prerequisite for the future successful digital creative, it would be the passion for discovery.
¬John Maeda

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

~Chris Pullman

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

Designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organizing and manipulating of words and pictures.

~Jeffery Veen

Design is the intermediary between information and understanding.

~Richard Grefé

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

~Tate Linden

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

The most popular typefaces are the easiest to read; their popularity has made them disappear from conscious cognition. It becomes impossible to tell if they are easy to read because they are commonly used, or if they are commonly used because they are easy to read.

~Zuzana Licko

Design is where science and art break even.

~Robin Mathew

There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.

~Milton Glaser

I see graphic design as the organization of information that is semantically correct, syntactically consistent and pragmatically understandable.

~Massimo Vignelli

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

~Frank Lloyd Wright

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.

~Nolan Bushnell

Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere.

~Mieke Gerritzen

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

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

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

~Erik Adigard

Great designers seldom make great advertising men, because they get overcome by the beauty of the picture – and forget that merchandise must be sold.

~James Randolph Adams

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

~Jeff Smith

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

~Ayse Birsel

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

~Jon Wozencraft

Design is an expression of the purpose, and it may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art; design depends largely on constraints and it is a method of action (there are always constraints and these usually include ethic).
¬Charles Eames

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

~George Santayana

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

~Robert L. Peters

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

~Jeffrey Zeldman

Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form.

~John Maeda

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

~Thomas J. Watson Jr.

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

~Adrian Forty

Being a famous designer is like being a famous dentist.

~Noreen Morioka

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

Good design is good business.

~Thomas J. Watson Jr.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to perform.

~Samuel Johnson

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

~Frank Chimero

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

~Edward Tufte

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

~Suleiman Leadbitter

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 graphic design solutions to communication problems can improve the flow of information in society and, therefore, substantially and positively affect education, social well-being and the daily enjoyment of life. In addition, good graphic design solutions can also have a positive economic impact.

~Jorge Frascara

Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay.

~Adrian Frutiger

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

Designing a product is designing a relationship.

~Steve Rogers

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

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.

~David Hockney

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

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

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.

~Scott Adams

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

~Don Norman

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

Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.

~Brian Reed

Simplicity, carried to an an extreme, becomes elegance.

~Jon Franklin

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

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

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

~Hans Höger

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

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

~Marty Neumeier

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

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

~David Carson

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

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

~Victor Papanek

Great design is all about details. With innovative material selection, sensible construction techniques and modern aesthetics one can craft a unique design language that sets a new standard.

~Roi James

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.

~Bruno Munari

If you have no intuitive sense of design, then call yourself an “information architect” and only use Helvetica.

~David Carson

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

Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.

~C.W. Ceram

Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.

~Freeman Thomas

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

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

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

~Wim Crouwel

Creative without strategy is called ‘art’. Creative with strategy is called ‘advertising’.

~Jeff I. Richards

Designers may be the true intellectuals of the future.

~Paola Antonelli

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it.

~Jim Jarmusch

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

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

Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order.

~Victor Papanek

Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy.

~Jan Tschichold

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

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

~Brenda Laurel

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

~Matt Beale

The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design.

~Massimo Vignelli

Technology over technique produces emotionless design.

~Daniel Mall

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

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 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

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

~Charles Eames

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

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

~Fabien Barral