These tidbits of wisdom will – quote by quote – reinforce important ideas about design
Inspire & educate your clients about graphic design, logo design, illustration, web design, typography, creativity and the business of design! Below you will find 100+ inspirational quotes especially picked for design clients – for your clients, not for you. A better educated design client will value your creative services higher. Borrow some stardust by quoting these designer stars:
Paul Rand, Ray & Charles Eames, Dieter Rams, Neville Brody, Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli, Steve Jobs & Jony Ive..!
Quote | Book Search | Subject | Tweet! |
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"Users will tell you what they think they want. Users will tell you what they think you want to hear. Users will tell you what they think sounds good. Users will not tell you what you need to know. You have to watch them to discover that." | Adam Judge | research | |
"If you have to explain it, you've failed." | Adam Judge | quality | Tweet this! |
"It might be smart, cool, and cutting edge -- but does it work the first time, easily?" | Adam Judge | user experience | Tweet this! |
"It is far easier to build something new than to rework someone else's attempt." | Adam Judge | design process | Tweet this! |
"The alternative to good design is always bad design. There is no such thing as no design." | Adam Judge | general | Tweet this! |
"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 | design process | |
"No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended." | Adrian Forty | user experience | |
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." | Albert Einstein | simplicity | Tweet this! |
"Good design encourages a viewer to want to learn more." | Alexander Isley | general | Tweet this! |
"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 | simplicity | |
"To say that something is designed means it has intentions that go beyond its function. Otherwise it's just planning." | Ayse Birsel | what design is | |
"An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it." | Bill Bernbach | creativity | Tweet this! |
"Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make." | Bill Bernbach | advertising | Tweet this! |
"I have made this letter longer then usual because I lacked the time to make it shorter." | Blaise Pascal | copywriting | |
"No matter how many times your amazing, absolutely brilliant work is rejected by the client, for whatever dopey, arbitrary reason, there is often another amazing, absolutely brilliant solution possible. Sometimes it's even better." | Bob Gill | general | |
"I've never had a problem with a dumb client. There is no such thing as a bad client. Part of our job is to do good work and get the client to accept it." | Bob Gill | what designers do | |
"A design isn't finished until somebody is using it." | Brenda Laurel | quality | Tweet this! |
"Design, in the end, is about creating better things for people. Along the way, it can generate better profits as well." | Bruce Nussbaum | why design matters | |
"If you keep shouting, you are not making communication any better. You are only removing the talking and whispering from the system. I find our society a bit noisy. I would like to contribute a little silence." | Bruno Monguzzi | simplicity | |
"The ideal situation would be to have a programmer who can code and create the graphics. This is rare, so the second-best option is having programmers and graphic designers working in tandem, like a well-oiled machine." | Chad Mureta | design process | |
"The details are not the details. They make the design." | Charles Eames | general | Tweet this! |
"To be realistic one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before." | Charles Eames | general | Tweet this! |
"Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose." | Charles Eames | what design is | |
"Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design." | Charles Eames | design process | Tweet this! |
"Nail the basics first, detail the details later." | Chris Anderson | design process | Tweet this! |
"Simplify, then add lightness." | Colin Chapman | simplicity | Tweet this! |
"Your products run for election every day and good design is critical to winning the campaign." | Colin Chapman | why design matters | |
"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 | design software | |
"Don't mistake legibility for communication." | David Cason | typography | Tweet this! |
"Design should never say, 'Look at me.' It should always see 'Look at this.'" | David Craib | general | Tweet this! |
"Member-created designs were how MySpace got its distinctive Times Square look - all flashing graphics and ribald images." | David Kirkpatrick | quality | |
"Truly elegant design incorporates top-notch functionality into a simple, uncluttered form." | David Lewis | simplicity | |
"If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative." | David Ogilvy | creativity | Tweet this! |
"My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That's our job." | Debbie Millman | why design matters | |
"Design is not about design." | Debbie Millman | general | Tweet this! |
"The quality of the product has much more influence than what the designer does." | Debbie Millman | quality | Tweet this! |
"Design is supposed to be about something else, and not about you; but I think the only way it's actually any good - and to get people to care about it - is if it's also about you at the same time." | Debbie Millman | quality | |
"Work that goes beyond its functional intention and moves us in deep and mysterious ways we call great work." | Debbie Millman | quality | |
"Having small touches of colour makes it more colourful than having the whole thing in colour." | Dieter Rams | color | |
"Good design is innovative, makes a product useful, is aesthetic, helps a product to be understood, is unobtrusive, is honest, is durable, is thorough to the last detail, is concerned with the environment, is as little design as possible." | Dieter Rams | quality | |
"People react positively when things are clear and understandable." | Dieter Rams | user experience | Tweet this! |
"Clients don't understand their success is reliant on standing out, not fitting in." | Don Draper | positioning | Tweet this! |
"Urban public space is a stage for viewing the field of graphic design in its diversity. A mix of voices, from advertising to activism, compete for visibility." | Ellen Lupton | graphic design | |
"Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking." | Ellen Lupton | general | Tweet this! |
"Typography is what language looks like." | Ellen Lupton | typography | Tweet this! |
"The best work is produced in relation to interesting situations - an open-minded client, a good cause, or great content." | Ellen Lupton | general | |
"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 | what design is | |
"At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism." | Erik Adigard | why design matters | Tweet this! |
"You are what you are seen to be." | Erik Spiekermann | positioning | Tweet this! |
"A friend once insisted to me that the plural of 'moron' is 'focus group.'" | Ethan Marcotte | research | Tweet this! |
"Designers are meant to be loved, not to be understood." | Fabien Barral | understanding designers | Tweet this! |
"Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea wasn't theirs." | Frank Chimero | understanding designers | |
"Start brave and brash: you can always make things more conservative, but it's hard to make things more radical." | Frank Chimero | creativity | |
"You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site." | Frank Lloyd Wright | why design matters | |
"An image can only be one element in constructing a sequence of understanding." | Germano Facetti | book cover design | Tweet this! |
"Traditional marketing is often seeing is getting people to do things but I think web marketing is about helping people do things." | Gerry McGovern | online marketing | |
"Keep your eyes open. Keep watching. Because whatever you see can inspire you." | Grace Coddington | inspiration | Tweet this! |
"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." | Hans Hofmann | simplicity | |
"A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time." | Henry Ford | advertising | Tweet this! |
"A wise person once said that you're only as creative as the obscurity of your sources." | House Industries | inspiration | |
"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 | understanding designers | |
"White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background." | Jan Tschichold | white space | Tweet this! |
"It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to." | Jean-Luc Godard | inspiration | Tweet this! |
"Make the system familiar. Use concepts, terminology, and graphics that users already know to make the system as familiar to them as possible, requiring them to think about it less." | Jeff Johnson | user experience | |
"Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration." | Jeffrey Zeldman | what design is | |
"As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product." | Jef Raskin | user experience | Tweet this! |
"Design brings content into focus; design makes function visible." | Jennifer Moria | why design matters | Tweet this! |
"Money is usually attracted, not pursued." | Jim Rohn | business | Tweet this! |
"Design adds value faster than it adds cost." | Joel Spolsky | business | Tweet this! |
"Only when the design fails does it draw attention to itself; when it succeeds, it's invisible." | John D. Berry | quality | |
"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 | design software | |
"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better." | John Updike | creativity | Tweet this! |
"It's easy to be different, but very difficult to be better." | Jonathan Ive | positioning | Tweet this! |
"A lot of what we are doing is getting design out of the way." | Jonathan Ive | quality | Tweet this! |
"Simplicity, carried to an an extreme, becomes elegance." | Jon Franklin | simplicity | Tweet this! |
"Drawing is speaking to the eye; talking is painting to the ear." | Joseph Joubert | communication | Tweet this! |
"An ad should be an appetizer, not a buffet." | Lee Clow's Beard | advertising | Tweet this! |
"Don't design for everyone. It's impossible. All you end up doing is designing something that makes everyone unhappy." | Leisa Reichelt | positioning | |
"Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read." | Leo Burnett | advertising | Tweet this! |
"When we engage in what we are naturally suited to do, our work takes on the quality of play and it is play that stimulates creativity." | Linda Naiman | creativity | |
"I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those two things." | Lindon Leader | quality | |
"Less is more." | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | simplicity | Tweet this! |
"Understanding, talking to and observing your audience is a fundamental part of graphic design research. In fact, it's the first thing they teach you about communication theory: what are you trying to say, and who are you trying to say it to." | Mark Boulton | research | |
"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 | what design is | |
"Design is easy. All you do is stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead." | Marty Neumeier | understanding designers | |
"The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness." | Massimo Vignelli | understanding designers | Tweet this! |
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." | Maya Angelou | general | |
"Clients are the difference between design and art." | Michael Bierut | what design is | Tweet this! |
"What a graphic designer tries to do is make sure the typography is emotionally consistent with the brand." | Michael Ian Kaye | typography | |
"Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere." | Mieke Gerritzen | general | Tweet this! |
"There are three responses to a piece of design - yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for." | Milton Glaser | quality | |
"The next time you see a sixteen-color, blind-embossed, gold-stamped, die-cut, elaborately folded and bound job, printed on handmade paper, see if it isn't a mediocre idea trying to pass for something else." | Milton Glaser | quality | |
"To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master." | Milton Glaser | what design is | Tweet this! |
"Solving any problem is more important than being right." | Milton Glaser | what designers do | Tweet this! |
"Design needs to be plugged into human behavior. Design dissolves in behavior." | Naoto Fukasawa | user experience | Tweet this! |
"Graphic design is for and to someone else... It's not about self-expression..." | Neville Brody | what design is | Tweet this! |
"Design is more than just a few tricks to the eye. It's a few tricks to the brain." | Neville Brody | what design is | Tweet this! |
"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 | quality | |
"Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others." | Orson Welles | general | |
"Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations." | Paul Rand | logo design | Tweet this! |
"It is no secret that the real world in which the designer functions is not the world of art, but the world of buying and selling." | Paul Rand | what design is | |
"A logo derives meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around." | Paul Rand | logo design | |
"A logo doesn't sell, it identifies. A logo derives its meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around. A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it means is more important than what it looks like." | Paul Rand | logo design | |
"Good ideas rarely come in bunches. The designer who voluntarily presents his client with a batch of layouts does so not out prolificacy, but out of uncertainty or fear." | Paul Rand | quality | |
"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 | user experience | |
"You cannot not communicate." | Paul Watzlawik | communication | Tweet this! |
"Practice safe design: Use a concept. " | Petrula Vrontikis | design process | Tweet this! |
"When I design, I don't consider the technical or commercial parameters so much as the desire for a dream that humans have attempted to project onto an object." | Philippe Starck | general | |
"Colour does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it." | Pierre Bonnard | color | Tweet this! |
"A great trademark is appropriate, dynamic, distinctive, memorable and unique." | Primo Angeli | logo design | Tweet this! |
"Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak." | Rachel Zoe | what design is | Tweet this! |
"What works good is better than what looks good. Because what works good lasts." | Ray Eames | quality | Tweet this! |
"Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended." | Raymond Loewy | why design matters | |
"When I`m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." | Richard Buckminster Fuller | quality | |
"Design is the intermediary between information and understanding." | Richard Grefé | why design matters | Tweet this! |
"Typography exists to honor content." | Robert Bringhurst | typography | Tweet this! |
"Avoid even a split second of confusion over whether a headline, subhead, caption, graphic, etc., belongs with its related material. Create a relationship among elements with close proximity. [...] If they are not related, move them apart from each other." | Robin Williams | proximity | |
"They enjoy giving form to ideas. If designers were made of ideas, they'd be their own clients." | Rudy VanderLans | understanding designers | |
"[logos are a] graphic extension of the internal realities of a company." | Saul Bass | logo design | Tweet this! |
"Design is thinking made visual." | Saul Bass | what design is | Tweet this! |
"What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love." | Seth Godin | quality | |
"The strongest logos tell simple stories." | Sol Sender | logo design | Tweet this! |
"You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt... or in front of a piece of graphic design." | Stefan Sagmeister | graphic design | |
"Real artists ship." | Steve Jobs | what designers do | Tweet this! |
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." | Steve Jobs | what design is | Tweet this! |
"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 | research | |
"A logo is not a brand." | The BrandGap | branding | Tweet this! |
"Great design will not sell an inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential." | Thomas J. Watson Jr | why design matters | |
"Although people are at the center of each, product design is generally about the object, whereas service design is about the journey." | Thomas Lockwood | service design | |
"When you make something no one hates, no one loves it" | Tibor Kalman | positioning | Tweet this! |
"You can't do better design with a computer, but you can speed up your work enormously." | Wim Crouwel | design software | Tweet this! |
"Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together." | Vincent Van Gogh | design process | |
"A healthy creative process should be able to give a coherent rationale to a client as to why you designed what you designed." | Von Glitschka | design process | |
"The client may be king, but he's not the art director." | Von Glitschka | what designers do | Tweet this! |
"Marketing without design is lifeless, and design without marketing is mute." | Von Glitschka | marketing | Tweet this! |
"Design is how you treat your customers. If you treat them well from an environmental, emotional, and aesthetic standpoint, you're probably doing good design." | Yves Behar | quality | |
"Babe Ruth was a Home Run king but he was also a strike out king. Always go for the fences, even if it means some designs strike out with clients. That's the only way to hit a home run." | Alex Zevallos | general | |
"You don`t need eyes to see, you need vision." | Anonymous | general | Tweet this! |
"I think as an art director, I work as a graphic designer always thinking in the global aim of the project." | Aurelio Sánchez | ||
"Everything is designed. Few things are designed well." | Brian Reed | general | Tweet this! |
"Technology over technique produces emotionless design." | Daniel Mall | quality | Tweet this! |
"When you have a writer that writes so movingly and inspiringly, all you have to do is act." | Danielle Darrieux | copywriting | |
"Brands exist in the minds of the people who interact with them." | David Airey | branding | Tweet this! |
"We designers, we don't work in a vacuum. We need business people. We are not the fine artists we are often confused with." | Dieter Rams | ||
"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 | what designers do | |
"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. Everyone makes design decisions all the time without realizing it." | Douglas Martin | general | |
"Don't be so humble - you are not that great." | Golda Meir | positioning | Tweet this! |
"If design isn't profitable, then it's art." | Henrik Fiskar | what design is | Tweet this! |
"We [designers] don't get hired to make pretty things or win design awards. We get hired to solve business problems." | James Bradley | what designers do | |
"Creative without strategy is called 'art'. Creative with strategy is called 'advertising.'" | Jef I. Richards | advertising | |
"Design has allowed us to stand out; to look different and show that difference boldly." | Joe Mansueto | why design matters | Tweet this! |
"Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent." | Joe Soprano | quality | Tweet this! |
"Socrates said, 'Know thyself.' I say, 'Know thy users.' And guess what? They don't think like you do." | Joshua Brewer | research | |
"I see graphic design as a matter of solving problems; art as a matter of inventing them." | Karl Gerstner | what design is | |
"... another misinterpretation that's always bugged me: Ship early, ship often OR Ship quality product. Quality isn't something to be sacrificed... Ship early, ship often, sacrificing features, never quality." | Kyle Neath | quality | |
"Every great design begins with an even better story." | Lorinda Mamo | general | Tweet this! |
"I look for three things in a project: 1) Compelling work; 2) fun client; 3) astronomical fees. However, to have a successful project, I really only need two out of three." | Lowell Williams | understanding designers | |
"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 | typography | |
"Business owners need to realize that their design is a reflection of their business even if it is not intentional. If you don't care about your design then your design is telling people that you don't care about your business." | Marco Suarez | why design matters | |
"I don't drop my original quote because I don't drop the quality of my work." | Paul Wilson | quality | Tweet this! |
"Your products run for election every day and good design is critical to winning the campaign." | Procter & Gamble | why design matters | |
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." | Red Adair | hiring | |
"Design is the application of intent - the opposite of happenstance, and an antidote to accident." | Robert L. Peters | what design is | |
"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 | quality | |
"Often our hardest job is to remove remove remove." | Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec | simplicity | Tweet this! |
"Design is art optimized to meet objectives." | Shimon Shmueli | what design is | Tweet this! |
"The most important part of design is finding all the issues to be resolved. The rest are details." | Soumeet Lanka | what design is | |
"Designing a product is designing a relationship." | Steve Rogers | what design is | Tweet this! |
"Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up." | Tate Linden | general | Tweet this! |
"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 | quality | |
"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." | Unknown | why design matters | |
"If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn't have to advertise them." | Will Rogers | why design matters |