Top 284 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Graphic Designers

Design is the art of planning, and it is the art of making things possible.

Simplicity, wit, and good typography.

I think there should be a rule that everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their lives.

There is no recipe for good layout, what must be maintained is a feeling of change and contrast. A layout man should be simple with good photographs. He should perform acrobatics when the pictures are bad.

To say a grid is limiting is to say that language is limiting, or typography is limiting. It is up to us to use these media critically or passively.

Be stimulated by rejection

Inspiration. From real life. I open my eyes and I travel and I look. And I read everything.

When I experienced altered states of consciousness, my whole philosophical structure crumbled, and that terrified me. And what scared me the most was the realisation that death was not the end!

Typography is a hidden tool of manipulation within society.

Do the work that feeds your soul, not your ego.

Neutrality has its own aesthetics.

For me, typography is a triangular relationship between design idea, typographic elements, and printing technique.

3 requirements for a good designer: 1. genuine knowledge and love of great design. 2. sound knowledge of principles and techniques of communication. 3. heart (passion).

To design is to plan, to order, to relate, and to control. In short, it opposes all means of disorder and accident.

My work seen in its totality is a statement about the integration of the contemporary artist into an industrial society.

Design must seduce, shape, and perhaps more importantly, evoke an emotional response.

The most popular typefaces are the easiest to read; their popularity has made them disappear from conscious cognition. It becomes impossible to tell if they are easy to read because they are commonly used, or if they are commonly used because they are easy to read.

And with it all, good design's not about what medium you're working in, it's about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.”

Making good design is easy. It's polishing the half-assed stuff that takes time.

If you're digging a hole in the wrong place, making it deeper doesn't help anything.

Sometimes you sacrifice legibility to increase impact.

A logoless company is a faceless man

The designer must think first and work later.

I don't see myself as an artist. I work with artists and collaborate with them, but then it becomes graphic design. It's not an art. I'm a graphic designer.

Good art inspires; Good design motivates.

The challenge is for the graphic designer to turn data into information and information into messages of meaning.

The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropiate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice.

Designers, stay away from corporations that want you to lie for them

Graphic design is a popular art and a practical art, an applied art and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the art of visualizing ideas.

For after all, a poster does more than simply supply information on the goods it advertises; it also reveals a society’s state of mind

I make solutions that nobody wants to problems that don't exist.

To create a memorable design you need to start with a thought that's worth remembering.

I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which is unreal. I like to mess with reality...to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not?

We're all naturally curious when we're eight years old. But as most people get older, they become less and less curious, so they ask other people to be curious for them. That's what I do for a living.

I don't think there are answers. I think there are thoughts.

Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.

If you keep shouting, you are not making communication any better. You are only removing the talking and whispering from the system. I find our society a bit noisy. I would like to contribute a little silence.

I would show my jobs to my mother, and she would always say the same thing: "That's nice dear". And then she would say: "Did you write it or did you do the drawing?" or "Did you take the pictures?" I'd always answer "no", then I realized the problem. My answer was then, "I made this happen". It's called design.

I've met a few people in my time who were enthusiastic about hard work. And it was just my luck that all of them happened to be men I was working for at the time.

Good design today requires more vision (a larger point of view versus the single brilliant idea), more consistency (a deeper underlying structure of language and form versus the simple, uniform application of visual elements) and more patience (persistence over time versus creative authoritarianism).

They enjoy giving form to ideas. If designers were made of ideas, they'd be their own clients.

Right and wrong do not exist in graphic design. There is only effective and non-effective communication.

For one thing, I don`t teach graphic design ; I teach people to find their own strengths. Second, I don`t hold back anything for myself. I share everything I know. I get back much more than I receive.

It isn't a question of enhancement through design. Whether an editor realizes it or not, design is part of what he does every time he prints the paper.

You have to be interested in culture to design for it.

Writing is not a series of strokes, but space, divided into characteristic shapes by strokes.

An image can only be one element in constructing a sequence of understanding.

Reading words puts them in your mind. You never forget. Even when you don't get a chance to dwell on the music, you can hear it in your head.

Imitation is the greatest danger of the young [artist].

Kinder than is necessary. Because it's not enough to be kind. One should be kinder than needed.

All projects are different, but you have to treat each one of them with care. Sometimes you get to build a luxury yacht; other times, it'll be a rowboat. You still have to make sure the thing doesn't spring a leak.

What is of value is that a particular photographer sees the subject differently than I do. A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think.

Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today. It is the typographer's task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him.

There are always going to be jerks in the world . . . [but] there are more good people on this earth than bad people, and the good people watch out for each other and take care of each other.

We read best what we read most.

There's nothing in my head that's worth anything at all because it's the culture that put it there.

It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.

Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.

Great design is serious, not solemn

Forget all the rules you ever learned about graphic design.