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. ~ Eliel Saarinen, Ethics for Architects

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

Anybody can make a toaster toast. Very few people can make a toaster something you covet. ~ Jay Mays, Esquire, 11/20/09

Chefs work with food, artists with oil paint, programmers with code. ~ Steve Lohr

Design follows invention, but precedes innovation. ~ Andrew McClare, American design classics

Great design will not sell an inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential. ~ Thomas Watson Jr.

Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence. ~ Aaron Betsky, InspireUX

Design should never say, Look at me. It should always say, Look at this. ~ David Craib, 401 Design Meditations

A challenge to the designers of the world: Make signs unnecessary. ~ Donald Norman, Turn Signals

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

A design career is a process of learning better and better what you know instinctively. ~ Mario Bellini

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-Exupery

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. ~ Freeman Dyson

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus. ~ David Hockney

As an entry in any intergalactic design competition, industrial civilization would be thrown out at the qualifying round. ~ David Orr