Design is like a friendly ghost that follows you around even if you’re unaware of it. Yup, your toothbrush is an example of design, and so is your dog’s bowl. See what we are talking about here? If a design is good, you don’t pay that much attention to it. If it’s stellar - then the item might become your new favorite thing. And if it is shoddy, then you’ll definitely notice that. So, this is our dedication to the unsung heroes, our ode to the everyday things, and a sonnet to the exceptional - a list full of design quotes.
Chances are you’re not a designer yourself, so these quotes about design will let you into this awe-inspiring world. If you are, though, view these words as creativity quotes celebrating the way you see the world and making it a better place one design at a time. And, if you are thinking of becoming a designer, these sayings will serve as inspirational quotes to stick to it and reach your goals! Either way, I think we can all agree that these are some powerful quotes and a genuinely worthy read.
Now, lets design a plan on things you should do next. First of all, you should scroll on down below and check out the famous quotes about design. Then, you should probably give your vote to the best quotes so they’ll find their way to the top of this list. And lastly, share these positive quotes with anyone in need of a bit of inspiration!
“If design isn’t profitable, then it’s art.” - Henrik Fisker
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“Whitespace is like air: it is necessary for design to breathe.” – Wojciech Zieliński
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“Design is more than just a few tricks to the eye. It’s a few tricks to the brain.” - Neville Brody
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“You don’t think your way to creative work. You work your way to creative thinking.” – George Nelson
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“I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares, as opposed to ugly things. That’s my intent.” – Saul Bass
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“Design cannot rescue failed content.” - Edward R. Tufte
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“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” — Shigeru Miyamoto
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“Design has to work, art does not.” - Donald Judd
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“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein
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“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
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“Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.” — Joe Sparano
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“Bad design shouts at you. Good design is the silent seller.” - Shane Meendering
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“It’s art if it 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
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“To create a memorable design you need to start with a thought that’s worth remembering.” - Thomas Manss
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“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
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“The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.” - Nolan Bushnell
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“It is no secret that the real world in which the designer functions is not the world of art, but the world buying and selling.” - Paul Rand
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“You can use an eraser on the drafting table or sledge hammer on the construction site.” - Frank Lloyd Wright
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“Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.” - Milton Glaser
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“Design is the last great competitive advantage.” — Seth Godin
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“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” ― Douglas Adams
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“Design is the intermediary between information and understanding.” - Hans Hoffman
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“Design is a formal response to a strategic question.” - Mariona Lopez
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“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. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.” — Paul Rand
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“A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.” — Brenda Laurel
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“No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended.” - Adrian Forty
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“Design is the body language of your marketing. Don’t slouch.” - Mark King
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“A graphic designer is a machine that turns coffee into beautiful, functional imagery.” - Lisa Manson
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“The details are not the details. They make the design.” - Charles Eames
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“Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries.” – Neville Brody
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“You can do a good ad without good typography, but you can’t do a great ad without good typography.” – Herb Lubalin
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“The best way to accomplish serious design… is to be totally and completely unqualified for the job.” - Paula Scher
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“There are three responses to a piece of design — yes, no and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.” — Milton Glaser
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“We design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.” — Anne-Marie Willis
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“I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.” ― Vivienne Westwood
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“Often the most important moment in the design process is figuring out what the right question is.” ― Thomas Heatherwick
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“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” — Scott Adams
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“Design is where science and art break even.” — Robin Mathew
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“Design is intelligence made visible.” - Alina Wheeler
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“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” - Maya Angelou
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“Bad design is smoke, while good design is a mirror.” - Juan-Carlos Fernandez
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“Design adds value faster than it adds costs.” - Joel Spolsky
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“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. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.” - Paul Rand
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“Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.” - Brian Reed
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“Have no fear of perfection - you’ll never reach it.” - Salvador Dali
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“Designers are meant to be loved, not to be understood.” - Margaret Oscar
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“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.” - Robert L. Peters
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“The function of design is letting design function.” - Micha Commeren
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“The more I deal with the work as something that is my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is.” - Marian Bantjes
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“Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.” - Massimo Vignelli
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“Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.” - Paul Rand
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“Good design is good business.” - Thomas Watson Jr.
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“Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems.” - Tim Brown
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“Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.” - Ellen Lupton
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“You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt… or in front of a piece of graphic design.” — Stefan Sagmeister
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“Simplicity, carried to an extreme, becomes elegance.” — Jon Franklin
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“You have to start with the customer experience and work your way back to technology.” — Steve Jobs
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“I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.” — Le Corbusier
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“Testing with one user early in the project is better than testing with 50 near the end.” — Steve Krug
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“Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea wasn’t theirs.” - Frank Chimero
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“Color does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it.” - Pierre Bonnard
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“Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.” - Freeman Thomas
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“Good art inspires; Good design motivates.” - Otl Aicher
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“The key to great ideas is not having them, it is executing them. And great ideas come from problems. As designers we call problems, briefs and we call reactions to problems, concepts.” – Kate Moross
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“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
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“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 Peterson
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“Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.” - Tate Linden
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“Design is easy. All you do is stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead.” - Marty Neumeier
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“Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere.” - Mieke Gerritzen
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“You can’t do better design with a computer, but you can speed up your work enormously.” - Wim Crouwel
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“Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together.” - Vincent Van Gogh
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“Only when the design fails does it draw attention to itself; when it succeeds, it’s invisible.” - John D. Berry
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“Design has allowed us to stand out; to look different and show that difference boldly.” - Joe Mansueto
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“I see design as a matter of solving problems; art as a matter of inventing them.” - Karl Gerstner
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“Design is the application of intent - the opposite of happenstance, and an antidote to accident.” - Robert L. Peters
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“Design is art optimized to meet objectives.” - Shimon Shmueli
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“Designing a product is designing a relationship.” - Steve Rogers
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“Bad design is like wearing a rumpled suit. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, but it may give people the wrong impression.”
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“The most important part of design is finding all the issues to be resolved. The rest are details.” - Soumeet Lanka
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“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.” - Dieter F. Uchtdorf
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“Design transcends agenda. It speaks to the politics of optimism.” – Paul Bennett
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“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci
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“People ignore designs that ignore people.” – Frank Chimero
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“Great design is a multi-layered relationship between human life and its environment.” – Naoto Fukasawa
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“Design isn’t crafting a beautiful textured button with breathtaking animation. It’s figuring out if there’s a way to get rid of the button altogether.” – Edward Tufte
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“Design and art are independent coordinates that provide their greatest satisfactions when experienced simultaneously.” – Milton Glaser
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“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.” — Don Norman
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“Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.” — Kenzo Tange
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“Design should not dominate things, should not dominate people. It should help people. That’s its role.” ― Dieter Rams
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“Every great design begins with an even better story.” - Lorinda Mamo
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“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs
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“Design is not a single object or dimension. Design is messy and complex.” - Natasha Jen
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“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
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“The alternative to good design is always bad design. There is no such thing as no design.” - Adam Judge
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“It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.” - Paula Scher
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“Accessible design is good design.” - Steve Ballmer
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“To say that something is designed means it has intentions that go beyond its function. Otherwise, it’s just planning.” — Ayse Birsel
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“Truly elegant design incorporates top-notch functionality into a simple, uncluttered form.” — David Lewis
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“Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.” — Pete Hein
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“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
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“Just because something looks good doesn’t mean it’s useful. And just because something is useful does not make it beautiful.” — Joshua Brewer
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“What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts.” — Ray Eames
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“The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable.” — Blake Ross
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“The role of the designer is that of a good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests.” — Charles Eames
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“Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. It must be spread everywhere — on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers’ homes.” — Vladimir Mayakovsky
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“It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.” — Paula Scher
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“Accidents often produce the best solutions. Only you can recognize the difference between an accident and your original intent.” — Jennifer Morla
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“Engineers and designers simultaneously know too much and too little. They know too much about the technology and too little about how other people live their lives and do their activities.” — Donald Norman
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“This is what happens when we design for everyone — we ‘dumb things down’ to the point that they become useless or inefficient for most people. How does this happen? Well, because although everyone in the world might want to use your product or your website, they’ll want to use it in a very particular way. In order to design your product well for them, you need to understand how they’ll use it and design to support that behavior.” — Leisa Reichelt
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“A startup founder who ‘gets’ user experience and design will likely create a more successful product than one who does not. It’s not just because a great user experience makes a product more enjoyable and ultimately fun to use. It’s because this type of design thinking and understanding of the customer seeps into every other aspect of the product.” — Jeff Gothelf
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“Usability testing should not be a stage gate in your design and development process. It should be a tool with which to gather helpful, diagnostic information from your target users. It’s a means of understanding the goodness of a design’s fit to the intended users’ problems.” — Paul J. Sherman
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“If you can make something significantly clearer by making it slightly inconsistent, choose in favor of clarity.” — Steve Krug
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“Design is a solution to a problem; art is a question to a problem.” - John Maeda
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“Technology over technique produces emotionless design.” - Daniel Mall
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“People don’t use a product because of the great design; great design helps them use the product.” - Viran Anuradha Dayaratne
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“Good design’s not about what medium you’re working in. It’s about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.” – Susan Kare
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“If no one hates it, no one really loves it.” – Jessica Walsh
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“I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those two things.” – Lindon Leader
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“Nail the basics first, detail the details later.” – Chris Anderson
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“Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.” - Piet Hein
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“Love blinds us. Don’t love anything — an idea, a tool, a graphic, a technique, a technology, a client, or a colleague — too much.” - Adam Judge
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“There is only one type of designer – the type that cares about type.” - Rohan Nanavati
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“It’s not about knowing all the gimmicks and photo tricks. If you haven’t got the eye, no program will give it to you.” - David Carson
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“An image can only be one element in constructing a sequence of understanding.” - Germano Facetti
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“Marketing without design is lifeless, and design without marketing is mute.” - Von Glitschka
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“Don’t design for everyone. It’s impossible. All you end up doing is designing something that makes everyone unhappy.” - Leisa Reichelt
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“To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.” - Milton Glaser
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“Practice safe design: Use a concept.” - Petrula Vontrikis
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“And when a design is completed, it should seem natural and obvious. It should look like it is always been this way. And it should last.” - Roger Black
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“There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.” - Massimo Vignelli
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“The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, empathize, synthesize, and glean insights that enable him or her to ‘make the invisible visible.’“ – Hillman Curtis
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“Design everything on the assumption that people are not heartless or stupid but marvelously capable, given the chance.” – John Chris Jones
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“Design is more important than technology in most consumer applications.” –Dave McClure
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“Curiosity about life in all its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” – Leo Burnett
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“Design can help to improve our lives in the present. Design thinking can help us chart a path into the future.” — Tim Brown
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“Design is a constant challenge to balance comfort with luxe, the practical with the desirable.” — Donna Karan
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“Design must be functional, and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.” ― Ferdinand Porsche
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“Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does.” — David Carson
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