Design Quotes

The ultimate object of design is form.

engineering

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

perfection

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

product management

That's been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity.  Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

product management

The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

product management

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.

Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time no energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart and want objects which are well thought through.

product management

The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting....I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to [create the letters]. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful. Historical. Artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture. And I found it fascinating. None of this had any hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

Apple Mac

A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

experience product management

We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We'd get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that.

Look at the Mercedes design, the proportion of sharp detail to flowing lines. Over the years they've made the design softer but the details starker. That's what we have to do with the Macintosh.

Apple Mac

I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that insight.

product management

We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

product management

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

foolishness

Perhaps believing in good design is like believing in God, it makes you an optimist.

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

Design is a funny word.  Some people think design means how it looks.  But, of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

If the basic lines of the automobile are static, if the car looks 'stopped,' it means just one thing to me: the design is no good.

Design is not for philosophy—it's for life.

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.

A hen's egg is, quite simply, a work of art, a masterpiece of design and construction with, it has to be said, brilliant packaging.

masterpiece