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.

There is a truism in the world of architecture that design creates culture.

Real artists ship.

What makes Helvetica more beautiful is the word “Helvetica” as a logotype in its typeface. It just makes the rest of the alphabets effective.

I’ll probably paint on this piano after I compose, for that will inspire me to make more awesome works.

(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...

I love the big scale and immediate impact of posters. They’re my favourite things to design.

Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.

We’ve always taken pride in having a convenient, interactive Web site, and the new design follows through on those initiatives.

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.

Everything is design. Everything!

Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.

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...

I told him to be creative and do his thing. He brought me back a design, and I actually had to talk him up in price.

Let’s say you’re walking around and you find a watch on the ground. As you examine it, you marvel at the intricately complex interweaving of its parts, a means to an end. Surely you wouldn’t think this marvel would have come about by itself. The watch must have a maker. Just as the watch has...

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...

Here’s where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

the most important part of design is finding all the issues to be resolved. The rest are details

You were born to journey in the direction of your purpose. Anything that halts your progress is contrary to your design.

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...

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.

Accident is nature’s way of starting a design; design is a man’s way of looking at the accidents.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.

I’d call it a design omission.

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.

Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a bare minimum.

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.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

We will auction one-of-a-kind items, some of our newest Sharper Image Design products, as well as established best sellers.

Think of it this way: if you wandered into a cave and saw scratched into the wall some markings which on closer inspection read “Gary woz ere”, how would you think that they got there? Would you guess that a river had run through and eroded the wall into a shape? Would you think that...

When she actually installed her design, it was not what we had as an organization or a committee approved.

If you can design one thing, you can design everything.

Weaver’s Cove has established that the smaller tankers will be feasible from a design and navigational standpoint.

Our design engineers worked with suppliers to accomplish a very significant mass reduction and consequent cost reduction in the radio. It allows us to pass these valuable savings on to our customers.

In pursuing a ‘way,’ Japanese typically move beyond an interest in craftsmanship to a kind of sacred search for the ultimate.

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

We should be development-by-design,

Brands play in an exciting sandbox of symbolic meanings.

Positioning is finding the right parking space inside the consumer’s mind and going for it before someone else takes it.

I faced people from all walks of business who fully disregarded design (though they were completely influenced by it). I also met fine artists who drowned in their own work and the dense creative universe in their minds.Then I met designers. And instantly fell in love. Let me tell you why.Designers are familiar with critiques....

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...

Sure some medical experts say coffee could be a health hazard, but they obviously never built a web site before!

I come from a strong scriptural viewpoint, and I find intelligent design lacking, … However, if things are created or designed, that means there’s a creator with a design in mind, and that is reflected in the creation, and it has a purpose.

To make my meal in a box taste better, I decided to tweak the logo, rather than the ingredients.

The genius of Laplace was a perfect sledge hammer in bursting purely mathematical obstacles; but, like that useful instrument, it gave neither finish nor beauty to the results. In truth, in truism if the reader please, Laplace was neither Lagrange nor Euler, as every student is made to feel. The second is power and symmetry,...

Spec = asking the world to have sex with you and promising dinner date to one lucky winner.

Going undersea requires a much more robust design. Pressure does horrendous things to technology.

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...

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...

This is my logo for Mike