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

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