Design Quotes

"A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous."

"A challenging economy is always good for design. It unites necessity and functionality. You are forced to be creative with poor materials."

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

"A designer is only as good as the star who wears her clothes."

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

"A greater focus on design in all new homes would make the best use of land, create homes and public spaces, and reinforce the structures of urban life."

"A lot of people don't get it, but I design from the inside out so that the finished product looks inevitable somehow. I think it's important to create spaces that people like to be in, that are humanistic."

"A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

"A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker."

"A shoe is not only a design, but it's a part of your body language, the way you walk. The way you're going to move is quite dictated by your shoes."

"After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared."

"All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth - it requires an ensemble of correct assumptions and valid calculations."

"All those lessons that I've learned on the court, I have applied them to my life outside of the court in business, my company, called V Starr interiors, an interior design company, and EleVen, which I wear on court."

"Always beware an unsigned architectural design."

"An image is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service."

"Any design, whether it's for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures."

"Any set of decisions about design is inevitably influenced by cultural prejudice, no matter how intent an architect might be to avoid it."

"Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products."

"Architects design buildings; that's what we do, so we have to go with the flow; and, even though I'm still an old Leftie, global capitalism does have its good side. It's broken down barriers - the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union - it's raised a lot of people up economically, and for architects, it has meant that we can work around the world."

"As Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a 'singularity.'"

"At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater!"

"Because every design must satisfy competing objectives, there necessarily has to be compromise among, if not the complete exclusion of, some of those objectives, in order to meet what are considered the more important of them."

"Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement."

"Books are better than movies because you design the set the way you want it to look."

"But I'm blessed to work with great people. I collaborate with brilliant stylists both here and in Paris. I work with a great design team. I really allow everyone to bring their ideas. I almost rely on them to inspire me."

"By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design science, and it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it."

"Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study."

"Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it."

"Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works."

"Design is a series of creative choices - it's a collaborative effort, an evolutionary process. You choose your fabrics depending upon what you want to say, then you work with mills to get those fabrics. Through the process, you realize what you want it to be."

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

"Design is so critical it should be on the agenda of every meeting in every single department."

"Designers are very fickle. I never wanted to be a victim of that. You're in one minute, out the next."

"Designing is a matter of concentration. You go deep into what you want to do. It's about intensive research, really. The concentration is warm and intimate and like the fire inside the earth - intense but not distorted. You can go to a place, really feel it in your heart. It's actually a beautiful feeling."

"Designing is my hobby. If I didn't do what I do for a living - at some point when I don't do this for a living - I'll probably just do design work. I love finding really special pieces of furniture."

"Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill."

"Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste."

"Eighteenth century American furniture and the design of the architects Greene and Greene are my special love."

"Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se."

"Every actor wants to win an Oscar, full stop. It doesn't mean you try to design things around how to accomplish that because that's impossible."

"Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginnings."

"Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

"Everyone in the astronaut program has a degree in a science field. The crew are the ones who do the experiments, help to design some of the experiments that come from other primary researchers. So it becomes very important that you have a science background."

"Everyone wants an iPhone, but it would be impossible to design an iPhone in China because it's not a product; it's an understanding of human nature."

"Everything we do is designed, whether we're producing a magazine, a website, or a bridge. Design is really the creative invention that designs everything."

"Fashion fades, only style remains the same."

"For every design goal you have, you have to have a corresponding measurement to know how you're doing - a way of measuring success."