“Design is the art of gradually applying constraints until only one solution remains.”
—Unknown
“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
—Charles Eames
“Design is the intentional and altruistic act of sythnesizing a harmonious response to a context. It is neither art, which embeds self, or science, which proclaims problem-solving.”
—Hanee Patenaude
“Design is everything. Everything!”
—Paul Rand
“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.”
—Isaac Bashevis Singer
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
—Henry David Thoreau
“A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures.”
—Ben Shneiderman
“Design is so critical it should be on the agenda of every meeting in every single department.”
—Tom Peters
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
—Steve Jobs
“Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability — they should go hand in hand.”
—Donald Norman
“Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose”
—Charles Eames
“To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master”
—Milton Glaser
“Design is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human problems by identifying them and executing the best solution.”
—Ivan Chermayeff
“The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.”
—Bertrand Russell
“Interactive design [is] a seamless blend of graphic arts, technology, and psychology.”
—Brad Wieners
“[Leonardo Da Vinci] combined art and science and aesthetics and engineering, that kind of unity is needed once again.”
—Ben Shneiderman
“We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone.”
—Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
“True interactivity is not about clicking on icons or downloading files, it’s about encouraging communication.”
—Ed Scholssberg
“Good designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organizing and manipulating of words and pictures.”
—Jeffery Veen
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
—Hans Hofmann
“The display is the computer.”
—Jen-Hsun Huang
“Visual appearance is one of the most effective variables for quickly differentiating one application from another.”
—Bob Baxley
“I’ve been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving.”
—Jeffery Veen
“Like all forms of design, visual design is about problem solving, not about personal preference or unsupported opinion.”
—Bob Baxley
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
—Charles Mingus
“…that strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.”
—Steven Johnson
“Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”
—Frank Lloyd Wright
“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.”
—Douglas Martin
“Problems with visual design can turn users off so quickly that they never discover all the smart choices you made with navigation or interaction design.”
—Jesse James Garrett
“Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems.”
—Tim Brown
“When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design”
—Bruce Nussbaum
“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 prefer design by experts – by people who know what they are doing”
—Don Norman
“Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”
—Paul Rand
“Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.”
—Paul Rand
“Simple design, intense content.”
—Edward Tufte