design is...

"In design sometimes one plus one equals three."
Josef Albers

"Good design is a Renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something."
Paola Antonelli, Museum of Modern Art.

"...some graphic designers don't just pick colours and take orders for typefaces."
Chip Kidd

"Everything is design. Everything!"
Paul Rand

"In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and 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, Apple Computer.

"Graphic design is a filtering process."
Muriel Cooper

"Design depends largely on constraints."
Charles Eames

"Designers solve problems for clients. Artists solve problems for humanity. The latter is the greatest problem."
John Maeda

"Style = Fart."
Stefan Sagmeister

"Form follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union."
Frank Lloyd Wright.

"I see this as a business that affects people's lives and affects people's brains."
Tibor Kalman

"Think more, design less."
Ellen Lupton

"Design is creation in or alteration of the world to meet the needs and desires of people."
Dirk Knemeyer, Thread Inc.

"it is the pervading law of all things organic... of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function.”
Louis Sullivan

"The most important skill for almost everyone in the next decade and beyond will be the ability to create valuable, compelling and empowering information and experiences for others."
Nathan Shedroff

"Design addresses itself to the need."
Charles Eames

"Design is as much an expression of feeling as an articulation of reason. It is an art as well as a science, a process and a product, an assertion of disorder, and a display of order."
Victor Margolin

"Ideas make design distinctive and identity, function, aesthetics and value make design work.”
Pentagram

"Beauty without depth is just decoration."
Metadesign

"Design must seduce, shape, and perhaps more importantly, evoke emotional response.”
April Greiman

"...constraint breeds creatively. Difficult situations breed astonishing results."
Jeffrey Veen, Adaptive Path

"The difference between the forgettable and the enduring is the artistry."
Bill Bernbach

"It used to be that designers made an object and walked away. Today the emphasis must shift to designing the entire life cycle."
Paul Saffo

"Form follows emotion."
Hartmut Esslinger, Frog Design

"Design builds the bridge between the black box of technology and everyday practice."
Gui Bonsiepe

"The designer leads a kind of karaoke existence, always singing someone else's song, and never saying what he thinks should be said.”
Bruce Mau

"What's dangerous is when designers use a language that people can't understand."
Paula Scher

"design… deserves attention not only as a professional practice but as a subject of social, cultural, and philosophic investigation."
Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin

"What is design? A plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose.”
Charles Eames

"When I design. I don't consider the technical or commercial parameters so much as the desire for a dream that humans have attempted to project on an object."
Phillipe Starck

"If a design doesn't feel good in your heart, what the mind thinks doesn't matter."
April Greiman

"Content comes first... yet excellent design can catch people's eyes and impress the contents on their memory.”
Hideki Nakajima

"A designer should only use these 5 typefaces: Bodoni, Helvetica, Times Roman, Century, Futura.”
Massimo Vignelli

"We believe customers just don't buy a product; they buy value in the form of entertainment, experience and self-identity."
Hartmut Esslinger, Frog Design

"Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem – the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible – his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time and so forth."
Charles Eames

"Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order."
Victor Papanek

"Available definitions of design are varied, complex, contradictory and in a state of permanent flux. Most would agree, however, that as a cultural concept design is determined by the outside forces that have shaped it and by the contexts within which it has manifested itself, as well as by the numerous faces it has presented to the world.”
Penny Spark (An Introduction to Design in the Twentieth Century, 1986)