Top 284 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Graphic Designers - Page 4

Play is the state of mind that we can use in our creative process to our advantage.

If you can announce the Higgs Boson in Comic Sans, clearly anybody can do anything.

We're very concerned with language and how language works. We're trying to engage people rather than dictate how they should be thinking.

Beige is the color of indecision.

Design is art that people use.

The best way way to get a visual image is not to think of a visual image.

The Sketchnote Handbook is neither about sketching nor is it about note taking. It's about receiving and processing the world in a more complete and insightful way. It's a software upgrade for your brain. For those who've been shamed into thinking that drawing is either beyond them or beneath them, this book offers a whole new way of mastering the daily onslaught of information and turning it into raw material for discovery. (For those of us who've done this all our lives, the book provides a beautifully conceived and lovingly illustrated treat, and a great gift for our left-brained friends.)

Design really can be anything.

Words have meaning, type has spirit.

Creativity isn't about the advantage or disadvantage of a specific time or culture. Creativity is something that comes internally from a human being having a genuine mistrust of rules. And that may be the constant. It's almost like there's some rebellion in it.

The better people communicate, the greater will be the need for better typography-expressive typography.

It is the photographer's decision at the two levels of seeing the picture - when it is shot and when it is chosen and printed that determines his personal style.

Once you have the statement, it will design itself.

It's through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.

I realise I'll have to acquire the ability to speak to my audience in between numbers. I've never had to do that. On the street I only focus on the keyboard settings for my next song, which takes a bit of time and a lot of concentration. So I'll have to develop that new skill, which gives me pause, because I'm afraid I'll say something stupid and disillusion people when they realise I'm an ordinary earthling - in fact, as ordinary as anyone else on this planet.

Even though I was chronologically 21, I was pretty immature and naive for my age, having grown up in a small, isolated ranching town, eighty desolate miles from the nearest city, and back when there was much less cultural homogenisation by way of TV.

When I say that a good picture has surprise quality or shock appeal, I do not mean that it is a loud or vulgar picture but, instead, that it stimulates my thinking and intrigues me.

The problem contains the solution.

Typography is what language looks like.

Learning who you are is what you're here to do.

When you study art history, you learn that there is very little that is completely new, and in many ways digital art is no different. I love to derive inspiration from all types of images: mosaics, hieroglyphics, petroglyphs, woven patterns in textiles, and needlework. There is a lot of very good "pixel" design work before the 20th century, like a 1760 sampler by Elizabeth Laidman that looks like a bitmap font.

That's how it is in heaven. It's just love, and no one forgets who they love.

We carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness.

It's much harder to be an in-house person than an outside person.

Be culturally literate, because if you don't have any understanding of the world you live in and the culture you live in, you're not going to express anything to anybody else.

Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier.

An electrician isn't an opinion former, but a graphic designer is. My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That's our job.

They should make new ways to better design buildings and books. The computer was the end of Swiss typography!

Of course design is about problem solving, but I cannot resist adding something personal.

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.

The way something is presented will define the way you react to it.

The picture is the imitation and converted reality of the goods, in short, an indirect substitute for reality.

Urban public space is a stage for viewing the field of graphic design in its diversity. A mix of voices, from advertising to activism, compete for visibility.

Find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that's how you grow.

Design always has a purpose.

I am convinced that abstract form, imagery, color, texture, and material convey meaning equal to or greater than words.

The eyes are hungry but often satiated before they see.

A designer…has the true responsibility to give his audiences not what they think they want, for this is almost invariably the usual, the accustomed, the obvious, and hence, the unspontaneous. Rather, he should provide that quality of thought and intuition which rejects the ineffectual commonplace for effectual originality.

I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I'll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, "Where did it all go? Where are they now?" It's so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.

Do not seek to change what has come before. Seek to create that which has not

No one loves authenticity like a graphic designer. And no one is quite as good at simulating it.

I plan to write more songs of my own, especially on behalf of the animals we needlessly raise for food, at their great expense, and at great expense to our precious, deteriorating planet.

I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.

The Nike swash that cost $30 and was designed by a Portland State University art student was probably worth that when she first showed it to them. At that point it had no equity at all. None of the guys commissioning it particularly liked it, they all wanted the Adidas three stripes and they thought that was a good logo.

I'm obviously a typeomaniac, which is an incurable if not mortal disease. I can't explain it. I just love, I just like looking at type. I just get a total kick out of it: they are my friends. Other people look at bottles of wine or whatever, or, you know, girls' bottoms. I get kicks out of looking at type. It's a little worrying, I admit, but it's a very nerdish thing to do.

Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries.

The moment clients realize that revisions are not an all-you-can-eat buffet, suddenly they realize they are not hungry.

If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to other good work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients, it will lead to other bad work for other bad clients.

The work needs to get out of your head and on to the table, and it needs to be done from the heart.

Language is a virus, money is a nasty disease.

I experienced direct telepathy with other people, and during one such incident, I I received a channelling of cosmic information from some being in another realm. It came directly through a friend who was tripping on acid, and as he began speaking stream-of-consciousness to me and my girlfriend - and both of us were very stoned on grass - his words conveyed cosmic instructions and information we all three knew to be profoundly important and meaningful.

This is what we've been waiting for: finally, an unprecedented critical analysis of the history of Dutch design. Mienke Simon Thomas's Dutch Design is a book to have and to read: an important and richly detailed study of the cultural, economical and social-political context of twentieth-century design in the Netherlands.

Everyone can have an opinion on a logo.

Design is more than just a few tricks to the eye. It's a few tricks to the brain.

The goal of design is to raise the expectation of what design can be

Astonish me! (Instruction to photographers)

Really, everything is designed.

A logo doesn't need to say what a company does. Restaurant logos don't need to show food, dentist logos don't need to show teeth, furniture store logos don't need to show furniture. Just because it's relevant, doesn't mean you can't do better. The Mercedes logo isn't a car. The Virgin Atlantic logo isn't an airplane. The Apple logo isn't a computer. Etc.

Graphic design is the spit and polish but not the shoe.

A column about errors will contain errors.