“Disaster can be a fine designer. Better than a pencil sometimes. It can lead you to safety.”
David Esterly
more infosource: The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making (New York: Viking, 2012), 111.
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category: design, disaster, safety
medium: Memoir
“Look, money is hard. It took me years to get comfortable with the idea of being a financial grownup. And I doubt that many of you got into this business for the money. I’m guessing you’re here because you love design. But to practice your craft you need to keep the lights on, and you need your financial house in order. The more attention you pay to this stuff at the right time, the less of your overall day you’ll spend worrying and fretting about it. Don’t worry about money, deal with money.”
Mike Monteiro
more infosource: Design Is a Job (New York: A Book Apart, 2012), 44.
category: business, design, money, school of life
medium: Nonfiction
“If the idea doesn’t gel after a certain amount of struggle you have to give it up. I read once about the concepts of the lateral idea and the vertical idea. If you dig a hole and it’s in the wrong place, digging it deeper isn’t going to help. The lateral idea is when you skip over and dig someplace else.”
Seymour Chwast
more infosource: The Left-Handed Designer, ed. by Steven Heller (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 8.
medium: Interview
“Four is an interesting number because it is a shape that would arouse the curiosity of a cat. Most numbers are either open or closed. Number 8, for instance, is closed; a cat has no business to look inside. A cat likes to peer into something that is half open—a little bit open—a mystery. Number 3 is obvious; number 1 is nothing; 5 perhaps is more intriguing, but 4 certainly is perfectly designed and engineered for a cat to look inside and find out what is going on.”
Saul Steinberg
more infosource: “Straight from the Hand and Mouth of Steinberg,” in Life magazine, December 10, 1965, 60.
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category: cat, design, four, number
medium: Magazine
“Every typeface wants to know: ‘Do I look fat in this paragraph?’ It’s all a matter of context. A font could look perfectly sleek on screen, yet appear bulky and out of shape in print. Mrs. Eaves has a low waist and a small body.”
Ellen Lupton
more infosource: Thinking with Type (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 37.
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category: design, font, Typeface
medium: Nonfiction
“I am deeply impressed with the designer of the universe; I am confident I couldn’t have done anywhere near such a good job.”
Buckminster Fuller
more infosource: “World Man,” Kenneth Stone Kassler Memorial Lecture, Princeton University School of Architecture, October 5, 1966.
category: architecture, arrogance, design, self-confidence
medium: Lecture
“In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, ‘Prove it.’ He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.”
Milton Glaser
more infosource: “Chip Kidd Talks with Milton Glaser,” The Believer, September 2003.
category: design, father, mother, parenting
medium: Interview
via: Austin Kleon“Wabi-sabi acknowledges that just as it is important to know when to make choices, it is also important to know when not to make choices: to let things be. Even at the most austere level of material existence, we still live in a world of things. Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things.”
Leonard Koren
more infosource: Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1994), 59.
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category: design, materialism, selection, stuff, wabi sabi
medium: Design Philosophy
“I love dresses, especially good vintage from the early ’70s–Yves Saint Laurent and Ossie Clark, and anything in silk, printed crepe, or chiffon. I love polka dots, peplums, cap sleeves, tea lengths, cloth-covered buttons, high heels, and wide belts. Everything I buy has to have a waist that fits; that’s the only design element about which I’m completely inflexible.”
Joanna Newsom
more infosource: “Joanna Newsom,” interviewed by Roy Harper, BOMB magazine, Issue 116, Summer 2011.
category: design, dress, fashion, musician, style
medium: Interview
“The photographs . . . were harvested on one trip round London. The things they show have very little to do with Design, apart from achieving its object. They show what weather, wit, accident, lack of judgment, bad taste, bad spelling, necessity, and good loud repetition can do to put a sort of music into the streets where we walk.”
Robert Brownjohn
more info“I like to be in New York. Le Corbusier described it in the 1930s as a ‘wonderful catastrophe.’ It is still a wonderful catastrophe, but inspiring. One thing I am crazy about is the seafood—the littleneck clams. I like them very much, at that place in Grand Central Station.”
Dieter Rams
more infosource: “Dieter Rams, Designer of Stereos, Shaves and Shelves,” The New York Times, May 11, 2011.
category: clam, design, food, New York City, seafood
medium: Interview
“I didn’t know what I could or couldn’t do and therefore thought I could do anything. In this sense, I was a person that did what I didn’t know I couldn’t do.”
Eriko Horiki
more infosource: Matter in the Floating World, by Blaine Brownell (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 122.
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category: craft, design, papermaking, self-taught, work
medium: Interview
“Everything has a message…Everything is the product of the mind. Everything that is ugly is the product of ugly minds. Beauty is a by-product of intellectual elegance.”
Massimo Vignelli
more infosource: “A Design Life Force,” by Ralph Gardner, The Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2011.
category: beauty, design, elegance, message, ugly
medium: newspaper article
“It may be that the incomplete story, the particle, the fragment, is now the preferred unit of information for our culture, and lack of place is more useful for presenting these fragments than to fix them into sentences or grids.”
Frances Butler
more infosource: “Reading Outside the Grid: Designers and Society,” in Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, edited by Michael Bierut (New York: Allworth Press, 1994), 95.
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category: design, excerpt, fragment, particle, quotation
medium: design criticism
“Only the Japanese would think of serving red watermelon in a green plate.”
Anaïs Nin
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