Top 40 Design Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Design has to work. Art does not.”

— Donald Judd

2. “Work for money, design for love.”

— Issey Miyake

3. “The best design is the simplest one that works.”

— Albert Einstein

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

— Steve Jobs

5. “Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.”

— Scott Adams

Also featured in: Quotes About Ideas

6. “When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.”

— Walt Disney

Also featured in: Moving Forward Quotes

7. “You design the life you want to have.”

— T. Harv Eker

8. “Design adds value faster than it adds cost.”

— Joel Spolsky

9. “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

— Pablo Picasso

Also featured in: Firsts Quotes, Art Quotes

10. “Design is everything. Everything!”

— Paul Rand

11. “Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.”

— George Santayana

Also featured in: Individuality Quotes

12. “If you do it right, it will last forever.”

— Massimo Vignelli

13. “Simple design, intense content.”

— Edward Tufte

14. “Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.”

— Paul Rand

15. “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

— Doris Lessing

16. “A general principle for all user interface design is to go through all of your design elements and remove them one at a time.”

— Jakob Nielsen

17. “You cannot not communicate.”

— Paul Watzlawick

18. “Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

19. “Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

Also featured in: Programming Quotes

20. “Design cannot rescue failed content.”

— Edward Tufte

21. “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”

— George Santayana

22. “You have to finish things – that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.”

— Neil Gaiman

23. “K.I.S.S.”

— Keep It Simple, Stupid

Also featured in: Focus Quotes, Creativity Quotes, Simplicity Quotes

24. “To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.”

— Allen Ginsberg

25. “Do things that matter, things that will make those better, and things that will make you better.”

— Jessica Walsh

26. “Where focus goes, energy flows. And if you don’t take the time to focus on what matters, then you’re living a life of someone else’s design.”

— Tony Robbins

Also featured in: Focus Quotes

27. “Make it like a sunflower.”

— Steve Jobs

28. “Make your life a masterpiece: Step beyond the demands of the moment and begin right now to design and live the life you deserve.”

— Tony Robbins

29. “Three ingredients of luxury lifestyle design are time, income, and mobility.”

— Tim Ferriss

30. “Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.”

— Leo Tolstoy

31. “You either commit yourself as a professional racing driver that’s designed to win races or you come second or you come third or fifth and am not design to come third, fourth or fifth, I? race to win.”

— Ayrton Senna

32. “I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain.”

— Anne Lamott

33. “The motors I build there were exactly as I imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision and the operation was always as I expected.”

— Nikola Tesla

Also featured in: Vision Quotes

34. “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

— Andy Warhol

35. “The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.”

— C.G. Jung

36. “Art does not begin with imitation, but with discipline.”

— Sun Ra

Also featured in: Discipline Quotes

37. “Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

— Steve Jobs

38. “Luxury is feeling unrushed. It is designing a life that allows you to do what you want with high leverage, with many options, all while feeling unrushed.”

— Tim Ferriss

Also featured in: Quotes About Feelings

39. “Grid systems in graphic design.”

— Josef Muller-Brockmann

40. “Feminine traits are called weaknesses. People joke about them; fools ridicule them; but reasonable persons see very well that those traits are just the tools for the management of men, and for the use of men for female designs.”

— Immanuel Kant

41. “You know, the only way I’ve found to make these pictures is with animators. You can’t seem to do it with accountants and bookkeepers.”

— Walt Disney

42. “Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can’t regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us.”

— Stephen Hawking

43. “Christian marriage is that sacrament which builds up the community of the Church and of society. Marriage has been inscribed in creation’s design by God, and, by his grace, countless Christian men and women have lived married life fully.”

— Pope Francis

44. “By its very nature and design, Network Marketing is a strikingly Fair, Democratic, Socially Responsible system of generating wealth.”

— Robert T. Kiyosaki

Also featured in: Marketing Quotes