105 Inspiring Design Quotes

In the ever-evolving world of design, inspiration serves as the cornerstone of creativity and innovation. Words have the power to ignite imagination, spark new ideas, and provide the motivation needed to turn visions into reality. Whether you are a seasoned designer, a budding artist, or simply someone who appreciates the art of design, a well-crafted quote can offer a fresh perspective and the boost you need to tackle your next project. In this journey through a curated collection of the top 105 inspiring design quotes, you'll find wisdom from some of the greatest minds in design, art, and architecture. Let these powerful words ignite your creative spirit and guide you on your quest for excellence in design.

1. “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” - Douglas Adams

2. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

3. “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” - Richard Dawkins

4. “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.” - John Maeda

5. “aesthetic isn't simply about good design for good design's sake.” - Noah Kerner

6. “Simple is good.” - Jim Henson

7. “Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.” - Paul Rand

8. “Sure some medical experts say coffee could be a health hazard, but they obviously never built a web site before!” - Geoff Blake

9. “Everything is design. Everything!” - Paul Rand

10. “...But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice... I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.” - Charles Darwin

11. “When the image is new, the world is new.” - Gaston Bachelard

12. “The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous.” - Paul Rand

13. “If you can design one thing, you can design everything.” - Massimo Vignelli

14. “I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

15. “Spec = asking the world to have sex with you and promising dinner date to one lucky winner.” - Jeffrey Zeldman

16. “Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.” - Jeffrey Zeldman

17. “Whenever something is engineered as complex, it is designed to keep you simple.” - Richard Diaz

18. “Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.” - Rebecca Solnit

19. “The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.” - Massimo Vignelli

20. “Clear thinking at the wrong moment can stifle creativity.” - Karl Lagerfeld

21. “Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.” - Karl Lagerfeld

22. “Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.” - Karl Lagerfeld

23. “The woman is the most perfect doll that i have dressed with delight and admiration.” - Karl Lagerfeld

24. “It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]” - Steven Pinker

25. “Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.” - Kevin McCloud

26. “I believe in doing the thing you feel is right. If it looks right, it is right.” - Dorothy Draper

27. “Als een site is voorzien van een elegant design maar verder niet bruikbaar is, zal de site falen. Het omgekeerde is echter ook van toepassing! Als een site perfect bruikbaar is maar is voorzien van een volkomen ongeïnspireerd en oersaai non-design, zal hij eveneens falen.” - Peter Kassenaar

28. “Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.” - Piet Hein

29. “Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in mind'.I think this distinction is wrong. There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight.” - Susan J. Blackmore

30. “Real artists ship.” - Steve Jobs

31. “As a designer, you have to think in time and see things in sequence. You have to see information as a narrative form - Paul Mijksenaar quoted by Kim Baer” - Paul Mijksenaar

32. “Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.” - Robert Bringhurst

33. “Designers provide ways into—and out of—the flood of words by breaking up text into pieces and offering shortcuts and alternate routes through masses of information. (...) Although many books define the purpose of typography as enhancing the readability of the written word, one of design’s most humane functions is, in actuality, to help readers avoid reading.” - Ellen Lupton

34. “Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy’s habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place, or product.” - Ellen Lupton

35. “[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.” - Jane Jacobs

36. “As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.” - Jane Jacobs

37. “The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity. ” - Jane Jacobs

38. “Ars est celaree artem.” - Ovidio

39. “Think of yourself as a brand. You need to be remembered. What will they remember you for? What defines you? If you have it in you, do something that defines you. Invent something, develop a unique skill, get noticed for something — it creates a talking point.” - Chris Arnold

40. “Parks, plazas, gardens, and rooftops are culture-producing places, not merely place for retreat. Sidewalks and bridges become ends in themselves instead of just a means of getting from one place to another.” - Sally A. Kitt Chappell

41. “In merging nature and culture the most successful cities combine such universal needs as maintaining or restoring contact with the cycles of nature, with specific, local characteristics.” - Sally A. Kitt Chappell

42. “Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.” - Joe Sparano

43. “Designing a product is designing a relationship.” - Steve Rogers

44. “Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.” - Tate Linden

45. “Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.” - Robert L. Peters

46. “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.” - Tom Peterson

47. “Design is not really a way for me to express myself. Design is a product that we produce for a client.” - Peleg Top

48. “Sketches are social things. They are lonely outside the company of other sketches and related reference material. They are lonely if they are discarded as soon as they are done. And they definitely are happiest when everyone in the studio working on the project has spent time with them.” - Bill Buxton

49. “Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable.” - Bruce Mau

50. “A distinctive appearance and a simple set of characteristics lead to an extremely flexible brand. (pg. 38)” - Woodrow Phoenix

51. “Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create—be it product, communication or system—is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as circumstances change: quirky or unusual solutions are often good ones. Nature bends and so should we as appropriate. Nature is always right outside our door as a reference and touch point. We should use it far more than we do.” - Maggie Macnab

52. “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” - Steve Jobs

53. “Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.” - Charles Eames

54. “Man was designed in a way in which he must eat in order to give him a solid reason to go to work everyday. This helps to keep him out of trouble. God is wise.” - Criss Jami

55. “Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

56. “A new, self-employed architect scientist is the one in all the world who may accelerate realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely practical within the scope of available technology.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

57. “The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

58. “It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

59. “Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

60. “What many refer to as intuition, then, is not the untaught or unteachable but instead is a learned understanding and respect of process, molded by experience and refined over a great deal of time and practice.” - Jon Kolko

61. “So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Walter Isaacson

62. “for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it’s better, it’s simpler, and it’s at the forefront of technology. That’s where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.” - Walter Isaacson

63. “One of the talents of the [late] great Steve Jobs is that he [knew] how to design Medusa-like products. While every Macintosh model has had flaws (some more than others), most of them have has a sexiness and a design sensibility that has turned many consumers into instant converts. Macintosh owners upgrade far more often than most computer users for precisely this reason.” (p.98)” - Seth Godin

64. “You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application.” - Bertrand Russell

65. “Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.” - Ralph Caplan

66. “Attention must be paid’ is the cardinal rule of design discipline, for the designer is above all someone who pays attention to the situation at hand.” - Ralph Caplan

67. “Designers shouldn’t design for museums any more than mummies should die for them.” - Ralph Caplan

68. “…no industrial designer worth his salt, or our attention, has been trained to work exclusively on any particular product, unless by accident. What he has been trained to do is practice a process called design, a process that includes esthetic choices but does not consist only of them.” - Ralph Caplan

69. “We are … the un-proud non-possessors of objects whose chief substance is that of the transient symbol. Our Puritan fear of the love of things turns out to have been groundless after all, for we do not love things or even possess them: they pass through our lives as barium passes through the digestive tract, unassimilated, their function merely to flash signals along the way.” - Ralph Caplan

70. “All our media are given over to things that are better left unsaid.” - Ralph Caplan

71. “Consciously or not, we feel and internalize what the space tells us about how to work. When you walk into most offices, the space tells you that it's meant for a group of people to work alone. Closed-off desks sprout off of lonely hallways, and in a few obligatory conference rooms a huge table ensures that people are safely separated from one another.” - David Kelley

72. “Design cannot rescue failed content.” - Edward R. Tufte

73. “Small, noncomparative, highly labeled data sets usually belong in tables.” - Edward R. Tufte

74. “Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.” - Edward R. Tufte

75. “Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.” - Nick Harkaway

76. “Freedom is more than just a patriotic concept; it is the purest intent of our design. Be you. Be free. Be nice.” - Steve Maraboli

77. “For example, they recently had a piece on a character--I think his name was Ambrosio D'Urbervilles--whose "design statement" was to stuff an entire apartment from floor to ceiling with dark purple cottonballs. He called it "Portrait of a Dead Camel Dancing on the Roof of a Steambath.” - Mark Helprin

78. “I love to be a graphic designer, but could we get rid of clients somehow please?” - Erik Spiekermann

79. “In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service” - Steve Jobs

80. “The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.” - Steven Johnson

81. “We must have design in a picture even at the expense of truth. You are using nature for your artistic needs.” - John F. Carlsons

82. “Instead of chasing the idea of truth, what we should be doing is embracing the medium of drawing and using it for a purpose that fulfils our needs as an artist or designer.” - Peter Stanyer

83. “We interrogate the world by making.” - Bill Burnett

84. “We have an internal check and balance system. By design we are so filled with possibility, opportunity, with greatness that when we live small, within the bottom of our capability, we innately know we should be living greater than that, and it creates a disconnect inside that leads us to feeling empty, unhappy, maybe even depressed.” - Steve Maraboli

85. “(found in Just My Type by Simon Garfield p. 19)If you don't get your type warm it will be no use at all for setting down warm human ideas ... By jickity, I'd like to make a type that fitted 1935 all right enough, but I'd like to make it warm - so full of blood and personality that it would jump at you.” - William Addison Dwiggins

86. “Ladies, most of you have no idea how beautiful you are. Don't let mean words from an insecure soul blind you from the truth of your beauty. You are beautiful by design... just the way you are.” - Steve Maraboli

87. “...and I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability.” - W. G. Sebald

88. “Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.” - Léon Krier

89. “design is so important because chaos is so hard” - Jules Feiffer

90. “The designer's job is to imagine the world not how it is, but how it should be.” - Sir Terence Conran

91. “Copywriting is a design muse, it carves a beautiful masterpiece in an imaginative way.” - Sharen Song

92. “To have a style is to be stuck.” - Jonah Lehrer from Milton Glaser

93. “A person is not a closed system, they can never be fully self-sufficient. We need each other because we cannot make everything ourselves. Everything was invented, but it was not done alone, so we should revere the times we are able to fill this complementary role for others, and cherish when others do so for us. It's the words of others that teach us to speak, the expressions of life by other people that teach us how to express ourselves.” - Frank Chimero

94. “Girly’ products can spur Japan’s growth in this century every bit as much as, if not more than, the ‘manly’ technologies.” - Morinosuke Kawaguchi

95. “In Japan, so many emoticons have been created that it’s reasonable to assume Japanese appreciate their convenience more than anyone else.” - Morinosuke Kawaguchi

96. “At the root of Japanese manufacturing lies a feminine delicacy and shyness as well as a childlike curiosity and fantasy-filled worldview.” - Morinosuke Kawaguchi

97. “Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.” - Jeanne Gang

98. “I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.” - Mies Van de Rohe

99. “You were born to journey in the direction of your purpose. Anything that halts your progress is contrary to your design.” - Steve Maraboli

100. “In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.” - Steve Krug

101. “As a rule, conventions only become conventions if they work.” - Steve Krug

102. “Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users aregenerally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues.” - Steve Krug

103. “The problem is there are no simple “right” answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.” - Steve Krug

104. “The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts to describe users in terms of one-dimensional likes and dislikes are futile and counter-productive. Good design, on the other hand, takes this complexity into account.” - Steve Krug

105. “For good or for bad, we define ourselves in many ways by the gadgets we use and the clothes we wear. We don't want to surround ourselves with cheap products. Nobody really aspires to that. We also don't want to pay for a diamond-encrusted ereader. We don't need bling; we just need to feel like the design speaks to us.” - Jason Merkoski