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

"Simple is good."
— Jim Henson (It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider)

"[...] during this century (the twentieth) we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport - the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show "normal" mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. 'Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn't do anything? Didn't everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?'

'Yes, child, that's why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.'

'What was the Restoration again, please, miss?'

'The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.'"
— Douglas Adams

"If you can't make it good, make it big."
— Michael Rowley

"If there's one thing you learn by working on a lot of different Web sites, it's that almost any design idea--no matter how appallingly bad--can be made usable in the right circumstances, with enough effort."
— Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability)

"A camel is a horse designed by committee "
— Sir Alec Issigonis

"Everything is design. Everything!"
— Paul Rand

"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 (Paul Rand: A Designer's Art)

"What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be "boiled down" and "simplified"? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information. "
— Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information, p. 51

"The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness."
— Massimo Vignelli

"If you can design one thing, you can design everything."
— Massimo Vignelli

"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

"...aesthetic isn't simply about good design for good design's sake."
— Noah Kerner

"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

"Whenever something is engineered as complex, it is designed to keep you simple."
— Richard Diaz (Illness Defined; The Theorem)

"I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. 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."
— Buckminster Fuller

"Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form."
— Robert Bringhurst (The Elements of Typographic Style)

"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 (The Meme Machine)

"The designer is here acting as a generator of memetic diversity, a filter of that diversity (the first selective force acting on new memes), and finally a transmitter of those novel memes that have passed that first selection test. (...) The designer may protest: ‘But I solved it’, but the memeticist would reply: ‘No, you were the brain/processing unit in which the cultural solution to the problem arranged itself’. "
— Derek Gatherer

"I believe in doing the thing you feel is right. If it looks right, it is right."
— Dorothy Draper (Decorating Is Fun!: How to be Your Own Decorator)

"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 (Handboek Website Usability)

"For a brief period of time the American electric-sign industry looked beyond its most immediate market and collaborated with store designers and architects in creating a style which became known as 'stream-line.' Later it became known as 'American Déco.' Whatever it was called or will be called in the future, it represents in terms of neon a thrust away from isolated signage toward an area of architectural ornamentation in which signage is but one element in an overall plan. — Rudi Stern"
— Philip Di Lemme (American Streamline: A Handbook of Neon Advertising Design)

"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 (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"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 (Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students)

"In no way can we improve a normal pregnancy and labour in a healthy woman; we can only change it, but not for the better."
— G. J. Kloosterman

"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 (Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students)

"Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated."
— Paul Rand

"The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all."
— Douglas Martin

"So that is the design process or the creative process. Start with a problem, forget the problem, the problem reveals itself or the solution reveals itself and then you reevaulate it. This is what you are doing all the time. "
— Paul Rand

"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