20th-century Designer Quotes

I have never met a designer who was retained to keep things the same as they were

George Nelson (designer)

Some kids spent their allowance going to see 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'; I spent mine on a great-looking lamp I'd found at the flea market and a ceramic bowl from a neighborhood garage sale.

What's the number-one thing people do on the Web? They read. Words and numbers are the raw material from which the vast majority of webpages are built. If reading is the primary activity on the Web, then readability is a primary function of Web design.

It's a time to stop, honor and reflect on the abundance, prosperity, people and lives we are blessed with.

Sandra Magsamen

For something to endure, it must be unique yet so universal anyone can appreciate it. The one thing that is universal is the search for purpose. It is the essence of the human spirit to seek a reason for being. This is why functional designs are so beautiful, so calming. Of course, timeless design is wasted if it cannot survive. This is why we race and test our cars so hard. Creating something that time cannot erode, something which ignores time, both physically and in concept. This is the ultimate victory.

Ferdinand Anton Ernst Porsche

Good design must be honest. I enjoy making things better, because somehow I am always making them for myself, as well.

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche

The Dutch customs once thought my pictures were photos. Where on earth did they think I could have photographed my subjects? In Hell, perhaps?

When you get your powers, you learn a lot about yourself. My professors called me mad. It was time for me to stop punishing myself, and start punishing everybody else.

Austin Grossman

Appearance is everything. I find that a view is secondary. Even in those apartments on the East River, it's dull, looking out at those little boats.

Colors are ghosts, they only start to exist when light is perceived on the retina as a stimulus and is processed into color perception in our brain.

Gianni A. Sarcone

The more I learnt about this cheeky – almost rebellious – company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had reason for being that wasn't just about making money.

I will do this. Nothing in my life matters except this. No moment of my life exists except this moment. I am born in this moment, and if I fail, I will die in this moment.

Throughout history, people have never before expected to be as comfortable as people do today.

No manufacturer, from General Motors to the Little Lulu Novelty Company, would think of putting a product on the market without benefit of a designer.

I think great video games are like favorite playgrounds, places you become attached to and go back to again and again. Wouldn't it be great to have a whole drawer full of "playgrounds" right at your fingertips?

Shigeru Miyamoto

In many ways I still resent the wretched yellow journalism that was clearly evident in (the media's) treatment of the game — 60 Minutes in particular. I've never watched that show after Ed Bradley's interview with me because they rearranged my answers. When I sent some copies of letters from mothers of those two children who had committed suicide who said the game had nothing to do with it, they refused to do a retraction or even mention it on air. What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while.

About 80 percent of our customers buy our shoes not to compete in, but to wear in their leisure time.

Ralf Metzenmacher

A handful of men working within the Zen sect of Buddhism created gardens in fifteenth-century Japan which were, and still are, far more than merely an aesthetic expression. And what is left of the earlier Mogul gardens in India suggests that their makers were acquainted with what lay behind the flowering of the Sufi movement in High Asia and so sought to add further dimensions to their garden scenes.

It is important to notice that these badly functioning designs were praised for 'elegance.' But elegance as theoretical scientists apply it is quite different. The elegance of a mathematical formula is that it explains a phenomenon beautifully, with no parts left over. In design, elegance is more readily perceived as a property of product than of process. If we had more elegant theories, we might look to design for more than elegance.

Many foreigners have asked me how we made the Danish style. And I've answered that it...was rather a continuous process of purification, and for me of simplification, to cut down to the simplest possible elements of four legs, a seat and combined top rail and arm rest.

Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.

It has to be well timed. It needs to have the right components that maybe contain emerging technologies or something like, say, when Doom came out — the Network play — there weren't many games like that. There was a really great 3D world that a lot of people hadn't seen. It was light-years ahead of Wolfenstein. It was shareware, so it had Internet distribution. We used the Internet to get it all over the place. So it used a lot of stuff that was just becoming popular at that time. id just capitalized on it.

Fashion is a language. Some know it, some learn it, some never will - like an instinct.

We live in a society that penalizes highly creative individuals for their non-conformist autonomy. This makes the teaching of problem solving in design both discouraging and difficult. A...student (has) massive blocks against new ways of thinking, engendered by some 16 years of mis-education...

In very other period of art history, the idea itself –the what – had been primary. Today the idea matters less than the way it is arrived at; it is the how that makes the work. This word brings us again face to face with the theme and its infinite variations. It is no longer a matter of knowing, of possessing the truth, but of approaching it... knowing that the road is long, knowing that the road does not end, knowing that the road is the end in itself.