Graphic Design Quotes

I h a v e a l l t h a t I r e q u e s t e d and I do not want what I haven`t got. I have learned this from my mother ; see how happy she has made me. I will take this road much further though I know not where it takes me.

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

Things that I can do myself, I either do by myself, or teach a willing undergraduate who doesn't know how to do those things by doing it for me. Things that I can't do myself, my graduate students should be doing.

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.

I went and studied graphic design, because it seemed to me that advertising is more honest - the image actually has a function. But once I started on that, I realized that was really boring.

Evolution is cleverer than you are.

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

Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

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

Designers may be the true intellectuals of the future.

Design is thinking made visual.

It was 4 or 5 years into my first design job before the idea of doing graphic design on computers started taking hold. I started working in 1980, the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, then the real desktop publishing only started coming around in 85-86, but it wasn't really until the end of the decade that the transition became irresistible.

But I find that for myself, without exception, the more I deal with the work as something that is my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is.

Creative people have to believe in the value of their work. If you don’t have any belief then you can’t give anything—designing is an act of giving, and a belief in the value of the work fuels the desire to express something. It’s important to know what your values are and to take care of them.

The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' you are already close to view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.

The dreamer is the whole dream. For us, dreaming and imagination are coupled with action to treat our lives, our business and our relationships as a constant unfolding.

I see graphic design as the organization of information that is semantically correct, syntactically consistent and pragmatically understandable.

To freely bloom - that is my definition of success.

You can't do better design with a computer, but you can speed up your work enormously.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

I've never had a problem with a dumb client. There is no such thing as a bad client. Part of our job is to do good work and get the client to accept it.

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

Compared with now when almost everyone knows what graphic design is and has some sort of access to the tools to make it, back then, it was really esoteric, you had to quantify it as being 'like commercial art', as one still does in certain circles. It was a strange thing to want to do for a living.

If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page... When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.

In the beginning I was really, really lean. For the longest time I did it all. I played every hat. I was in the factory, doing the graphic design, the photography, the selling - literally everything. I saved money doing what I could myself. It was hard but I learned. I learned that nobody's better than you to get your business off the ground. The experience you get is priceless.

Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

Tradition, history and respect; that kind of qualities I admire, that I want to see preserved. Time is the only commodity that matters. Being successful doesn't make you manage your time well; managing your time well makes you successful. Goals, Priorities, and Planning. Why am I doing this? What is the goal? Why will I succeed? What happen if I chose not to do it? 'Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement'.

As we become more mature we will learn to master the interplay between the past and the present and not be so self-conscious of our rejection or acceptance of tradition. We will not make the mistake that both rigid modernists and conservatives make, of confusing the quality of form with the specific forms themselves.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.

I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares, as opposed to ugly things. That's my intent.

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination   Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it.

Graphic design, which evokes the symmetria of Vituvius, the dynamic symmetry of Hambidge, the asymmetry of Mondrian; which is a good gestalt, generated by intuition or by computer, by invention or by a system of coordinates, is not good design if it does not communicate.

Asymmetry is the rhythmic expression of funtional design. In addition to being more logical, asymmetry has the advantage that its complete appearance is far more optically effective than symmetry.

When I was in art school, the photo kids were separated from the rest. If you did sculpture or painting or graphic design, you were all taking the same classes, but the photographers just went straight into photography.

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

It has become a cliché to announce that 'we live in a remix culture'... What was referred to in post-modern times as quoting, appropriation, and pastiche no longer needs any special name. Now this is simlpy the basic logic of cultural production.

I was studying graphic design at the time, when negative scanners and all that stuff was coming out, and you could do it all in your apartment. So I would shoot, make contact sheets, scan all the cool negatives, and make all these zines and books of my photos to give to my friends. I was really into zine- and bookmaking from skate culture.

Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.

Graphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye.

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

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.

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

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

We think about the world in all ways we experience it ; we think visually, we think in sign, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract term, we think in movement. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration.

You are the only person on earth who can use your ability.