The graphic designer has always wanted to grow and always wanted to be getting better every day. Through the words of wisdom of world-class designers, as well as other renowned artists I think you can dig a lot. So here's a collection of inspirational
quotes from designers and even artists. If you like this collection please share it with your friends.
Serge Zuev
The original idea makes design distinctive, function makes it work and quality adds value.
Steff Geissbuhler
I have never designed a logotype without first trying it in Helvetica. It is still the most versatile, classic and readable of all typefaces.
Don Newgren
Design is intelligence made visible.
Richard Grefé
Design is the intermediary between information and understanding.
Nolan Bushnell
The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.
Jon Franklin
Simplicity, carried to an an extreme, becomes elegance.
Vincent Van Gogh
Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together.
Primo Angeli
A great trademark is appropriate, dynamic, distinctive, memorable and unique.
Emil Ruder
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.
Daniel Boorstin
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.
John Updike
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
Scott Adams
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.
Sol Sender.
The strongest logos tell simple stories.
Marty Neumeier
Design is easy. All you do is stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead.
The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong.
Brian Reed
Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.
Massimo Vignelli
There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.
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.
Frank Chimero
People ignore design that ignores people.
Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea wasn’t theirs.
Charles Eames
Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.
Thomas Vasquez
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.
Joe Sparano
Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.
Victor Papanek
The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.
Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order.
Michael Ian Kaye
What a graphic designer tries to do is make sure the typography is emotionally consistent with the brand.
Tim Parsey
Our opportunity, as designers, is to learn how to handle the complexity, rather than shy away from it, and to realize that the big art of design is to make complicated things simple.
Paul Rand
Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.
Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.
Without aesthetic, design is either the humdrum repetition of familiar clichés or a wild scramble for novelty.
Without the aesthetic, the computer is but a mindless speed machine, producing effects without substance.
Form without relevant content, or content without meaningful form.
The designer does not, as a rule, begin with a preconceived idea. His idea is the result of subjective and objective thought, and the design a product of the idea.
In order, therefore, to achieve an honest and effective solution he necessarily passes thought some sort of mental process … Consciously or not, he analyzes, interprets, translates … He improvises, invents new techniques and combinations.
He coordinates and integrates his material so that he may restate his problem in terms of ideas, pictures, forms, and shapes. He unifies, simplifies, eliminates superfluities. He symbolizes … abstract from his material by association and analogy.
He intensifies and reinforces his symbol with appropriate accessories to achieve clarity and interest. He draws upon instinct and intuition. He considers the spectator, his feelings and predilections.
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. He new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.
Art is an idea that has found its perfect visual expression. And design is the vehicle by which this expression is made possible. Art is a noun, and design is a noun and also a verb. Art is a product and design is a process. Design is the foundation of all the arts.
Steve Rogers
Designing a product is designing a relationship.
Edwin Schlossberg
It is easy to fail when designing an interactive experience. Designers fail when they do not know the audience, integrate the threads of content and context, welcome the public properly, or make clear what the experience is and what the audience’s role in it will be.
William Bernbach
Advertising doesn¹t create a product advantage. It can only convey it.
Thomas J. Watson Jr.
Good design is good business.
Great design will not sell an inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential.
Jon Wozencraft
…designers can make life more bearable by producing stuff that touches its audience rather than fucks them in the head.
Roi James
Great design is all about details. With innovative material selection, sensible construction techniques and modern aesthetics one can craft a unique design language that sets a new standard.
Erik Adigard
Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.
Frank Lloyd Wright
I never design a building before I’ve seen the site and met the people who will be using it.
Richard Saul Wurman
The fundamental failure of most graphic, product, architectural, and even urban design is its insistence on serving the God of Looking-Good rather than the God of Being-Good.
Frederic W. Goudy
Anyone that would letterspace blackletter would steal sheep.
Adrian Frutiger
Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay.
If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page… When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.
Aaron Russell
Every designers’ dirty little secret is that they copy other designers’ work. They see work they like, and they imitate it. Rather cheekily, they call this inspiration.
Jan Tschichold
Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy.
John Ruskin
It’s unwise to pay too much, but is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little – that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.
The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot, it can’t be done! If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.
Scott Stevenson
Visual design is often the polar opposite of engineering: trading hard edges for subjective decisions based on gut feelings and personal experiences. It’s messy, unpredictable, and notoriously hard to measure. The apparently erratic behavior of artists drives engineers bananas. Their decisions seem arbitrary and risk everything with no guaranteed benefit.
Robin Mathew
Design is where science and art break even.
Zuzana Licko
The most popular typefaces are the easiest to read; their popularity has made them disappear from conscious cognition. It becomes impossible to tell if they are easy to read because they are commonly used, or if they are commonly used because they are easy to read.
Mieke Gerritzen
Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere.
Bruno Munari
A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.
Robert L. Peters
Design is the application of intent - the opposite of happenstance, and an antidote to accident.
Valerie Pettis
Design is the search for a magical balance between business and art; art and craft; intuition and reason; concept and detail; playfulness and formality; client and designer; designer and printer; and printer and public.
David Craib
Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should always say, “Look at this.”
Juan-Carlos Fernàndez
Bad design is smoke, while good design is a mirror.
Leisa Reichelt
Don’t design for everyone. It’s impossible. All you end up doing is designing something that makes everyone unhappy.
Ellen Lupton
Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.
Jeff Smith
The design process, at its best, integrates the aspirations of art, science, and culture.
Edward Tufte
Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.
Confusion and clutter are the failure of design, not the attributes of information.
Jenaiha Woods
Design is the contrast of the core of limitations therefore there are no boundaries. It is simply an interpretation of creativity.
Alina Wheeler
Design is intelligence made visible.
Alexander Gelman
Any good typeface can be completely destroyed when misused or extensively overused. Helvetica seemed to sustain a beating like no other. Still fresh, still popular, Helvetica is king.
Jeffrey Veen
Math is easy; design is hard.
Designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organizing and manipulating of words and pictures.
Suleiman Leadbitter
Design trends online change more often than the wind, and slightly less often than my socks.
Jeffrey Zeldman
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.
Paola Antonelli
People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.
Designers may be the true intellectuals of the future.
Linda van Deursen
Grids do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in relation to the content. We never start with a grid. We start with an idea which is then translated into a form, a structure.
Tate Linden
Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.
Chris Pullman
Design is not the narrow application of formal skills, it is a way of thinking.
Fabien Barral
Designers are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
Matt Beale
Design is about making things good (and then better) and right (and fantastic) for the people who use and encounter them.
Salvador Dali
Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
Luke Wroblewski
Visual organization is the deliberate prioritization of meaning within a visual design. It’s the process of applying the principles behind perception – how we make sense of what we see – to illuminate relationships between content and actions.
Steve Jobs
Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
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.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
John Maeda
Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form.
Carrie Phillips
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.
Don Norman
Behavioral design is all about feeling in control. Includes: usability, understanding, but also the feel.
Hans Hofmann
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
Drew Davies
Good design must be defined by appropriateness to audience and goals, and by its effectiveness, not by its adherence to Swiss design or the number of awards it wins.
Noreen Morioka
Being a famous designer is like being a famous dentist.
Robert L. Peters
Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.
Wouter Stokkel
It’s art if can’t be explained.
It’s fashion if no one asks for an explanation.
It’s design if it doesn’t need explanation.
Wim Crouwel
You can’t do better design with a computer, but you can speed up your work enormously.
Stanley Morrison
Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader. The good type-designer therefore realizes that, for a new fount to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty.
Andrew Lewis
I love the comment, “You must love designing for a living.” At that point I usually start to laugh or break into uncontrollable tears.
Freeman Thomas
Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.
Tom Peters
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.
Hans Höger
Designers have a dual duty; contractually to their clients and morally to the later users and recipients of their work.
David Hockney
Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.
Wolfgang Weingart
Berthold is still a good typeface, but even Berthold has some less than attractive features, and then I just cut them off because I didn’t like them.
Albert Einstein
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.
I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
Milton Glaser
To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.
The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire, and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes and even modest talent with those characteristics grows.
Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.
There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.
Christine Suewon Lee
I find modernist design boring, but it so much faster!
Douglas Adams
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Sir Alec Issigonis
A camel is a horse designed by a committee.
Leo Frankowski
A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is.
Robynne Raye
For me, design is like choosing what I’m going to wear for the day - only much more complicated and not really the same at all.
Jeff I. Richards
Creative without strategy is called ‘art’. Creative with strategy is called ‘advertising’.
Thomas F. Schutte
Design is a means toward accomplishing the end goals of serving markets and generating profits. Furthermore, design is an element in social responsibility. Good design allows “form to complement performance.” The way things look is not irrelevant to the way things work: how they work is how they should look.
Colin Wright
Art is like masturbation. It is selfish and introverted and done for you and you alone. Design is like sex. There is someone else involved, their needs are just as important as your own, and if everything goes right, both parties are happy in the end.
Charles Brower
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person’s brow.
Noreen Morioka
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.
Eric Gill
There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools.
Brian Webb
I would show my my jobs to my mother, and she would always say the same thing: “That’s nice dear.” And then she would say, “Did you write it?” or “Did you do the drawing?” or “Did you take the pictures?” I’d always answer “no,” then I realized the problem. My answer was then, “I made this happen. It’s called design.”
Dan Brown
Most [clients] expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.
Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
Creativity often consists merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?
Daniel Mall
Technology over technique produces emotionless design.
Mark Boulton
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.
Brenda Laurel
A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.
Michelangelo
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
Henrik Fiskar
If design isn’t profitable, then it’s art.
Mandy Brown
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.
General George S. Patton
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn¹t thinking.
David Carson
Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does.
If you have no intuitive sense of design, then call yourself an “information architect” and only use Helvetica.
Scott Hanselman
The difference between a Designer and Developer, when it comes to design skills, is the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.
Petrula Vrontikis
Practice safe design: Use a concept.
Jim Jarmusch
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it.
Orson Welles
Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
Raymond Loewy
Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.
Eliel Saarinen
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
David Lewis
Truly elegant design incorporates top-notch functionality into a simple, uncluttered form.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
C.W. Ceram
Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.
Chris Bangle
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.
Erik Adigard
At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism.
Ayse Birsel
To say that something is designed means it has intentions that go beyond its function. Otherwise it’s just planning.
Adrian Forty
No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended.
Samuel Johnson
Many things difficult to design prove easy to perform.
Douglas Martin
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.
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—like Moliere’s M. Jourdain who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life—and good design is simply the result of making these decisions consciously, at the right stage, and in consultation with others as the need arises.
Picasso
Picasso was in a park when a woman approached him and asked him to draw a portrait of her. Picasso agreed and quickly sketches her. After handing the sketch to her, she is pleased with the likeness and asks how much she owed to him.
Picasso replies: “$5,000.”
The woman screamed, “but it took you only five minutes.”
“No, madam, it took me all my life,” replied Picasso.
George Santayana
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
