Inspirational Graphic Design Quotes

Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended. ~ Raymond Loewy

Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking. ~ Ellen Lupton

The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to 'tidy up' the mess, as opposed to understanding it's a 'day one' issue and part of everything. ~ Tom Peterson

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. ~ Michael Bierut

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. ~ Marian Bantjes

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. ~ Bob Gill

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. ~ Howard Aiken

I'm an artist, so I love the graphic design of Instagram. ~ Pierce Brosnan

The design process, at its best, integrates the aspirations of art, science, and culture. ~ Jeff Smith

Never forget that all these people are primarily a visual people. They are designers, window dressers, models, photographers, graphic artists. They design the windows at Saks. Do you understand? They are a visual people, and they value the eye, and their sins, as Saint Augustine said, are the sins of the eye. And being people who live on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds or hearts. It sounds absurd but it's that simple. Everything is beautiful here, and that is all it is: beautiful. Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye - and you will handle it all beautifully. You will know exactly what you are dealing with. ~ Andrew Holleran

Twenty-six letters: Marjorie Morningstar or Ulysses.
The man-made world means exactly that. There isn't an inch of it that doesn't have to be dealt with, figured out, executed. And it's waiting for you to decide what it's going to look like. ~ Chip Kidd

There is a verse [in the Koran] that says God swears by time. Anything you gain in life, you pay for with your time. Time is the most important thing that has been given to man. ~ Shirin Ebadi

You have to be interested in culture to design for it. ~ Lorraine Wild

You cannot not communicate. ~ Paul Watzlawick

Software developers come mainly from engineering and don't see how similar their industry has become to the one that produces magazines, newspapers, books, TV shows, and movies. Most software developers haven't yet learned to develop and follow strict standards for layout and graphic design and to pay as much attention to detail as traditional publishers and media studios do. As a result, graphic design and layout bloopers often get a "Who cares? It looks OK to me!" reaction from developers. ~ Jeff Johnson

To give emphasis only to beauty makes me think of a mathematics that deals with positive numbers only. ~ Paul Klee

What went through the mind of Christ between the sunset hour when the Roman
soldier drove the first nail through his flesh, and the hour when he died? For these thoughts would determine not only how he accepted his fate, but
also the position of his body on the cross. Donatello's Christ accepted in serenity, and thought nothing. Brunelleschi's Christ was so ethereal that he died at the first touch of the nail, and had no time to think.
He returned to his workbench, began exploring his mind with charcoal and ink. On Christ's face appeared the expression, "I am in agony, not from the iron nails, but form the rust of doubt." He could not bring himself to convey Christ's divinity by anything so obvious as a halo; it had to be portrayed through an inner force, strong enough to conquer his misgivings at this hour of severest trial.
It was inevitable that his Christ would be closer to man than to God. He did not know that he was to be crucified. He neither wanted it nor liked it. And as a result his body was twisted in conflict, torn, like all men, by inner
questioning.
When he was ready to begin carving he had before him a new concept: he turned
Christ's head and knees in opposite directions, establishing through his contrapuntal design a graphic tension, the intense physical and spiritual
inner conflict of a man who is being pulled two ways. ~ Irving Stone

It wasn't an architect or a designer who invented objects, but an artisan. ~ Giorgetto Giugiaro

The Hewitt sisters were these amazing - both sort of philanthropists and dilettantes who went out and single-handedly collected all of these of-the-moment designs in wallpaper and textiles and in graphic design in order to teach people about design. ~ Jake Barton

A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is. ~ Leo Frankowski

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. ~ John Maeda

I didn't think that personal style had much value in graphic design. ~ Stefan Sagmeister

avoid underlining text, except in the case of hyperlinks. ~ Graphic Design Artists United

My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling. ~ Jonathan Hickman

Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact. ~ Michael Bierut

Graphic design was largely about communication in an artistic or creative manner, much like writing is used to convey ideas. Many designers completely miss that aspect of the "art." Some are completely satisfied with just making things pretty, without taking the communication element into consideration. ~ Jeff Fisher

Typographical design should perform optically what the speaker creates through voice and gesture of his thoughts. ~ El Lissitzky

Forget all the rules you ever learned
about graphic design. ~ Bob Gill

If I was influenced by anything, it was architecture: structure having to do with logic. If you don't do it right, the whole thing is going to cave in. In a certain sense, you can carry that to graphic design. Fortunately, however, nobody is going to die if you do it wrong. ~ Paul Rand

I've always considered myself a graphic artists - a draftsman - as opposed to a typist. I do still work on a drawing table. At times drawing on a computer feels like I'm drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch. ~ Michael Schwab

Designers may be the true intellectuals of the future. ~ Paola Antonelli

Graphic Design for its own sake will never happen, because the concept cancels itself out - a poster about nothing other than itself is not Graphic Design, it's ... makin' ART. ~ Chip Kidd

Graphic designers should be literate in graphic design history.
Being able to design well is not always enough. Knowing the roots
of design is necessary to avoid reinvention, no less inadvertent plagiarism. ~ Steven Heller

Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can't afford decent computers - these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile - but because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they'd have the greatest British designer working for them - Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don't. They've got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.
~ Charlie Brooker

Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages. ~ Steven Heller

Never mistake legibility for communication. ~ David Carson

Inner beauty is for amateurs. ~ Anne Taintor

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. ~ Vaughan Oliver

The more uninteresting the letter, the more useful it is to the typographer. ~ Piet Zwart

In A Life In Books, author and graphic design visionary Warren Lehrer crafts a vivid kaleidoscopic odyssey that frames one man's life through not one, but one hundred different books - and book jackets ... An unmistakably modern evocation of the illuminated manuscript. ~ Jessica Helfand

She'd been lax in her responsibilities as the building owner because her tenants were her friends. Emmylou rented out the left half of the bottom floor space for her massage studio. Chaz rented the tiny center section for his various artistic enterprises. Amery's graphic design business was on the right bottom half and she lived in the loft that spanned the length of the two-story building. ~ Lorelei James

A billion and a half human souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity, in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere.
A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them - to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

Over the years, I observed that many talented graphic designers, including those in my own family, had difficulty getting their designs to market. I thought it would be possible to hold open stationery design competitions where all designers could participate. ~ Mariam Naficy

We've all been in positions where we felt out of place or not accepted for whatever reason. For me, that's been my life. I've always been that person that stood out. And what makes you an outcast is what makes you unique, and you should harness that. Being a black sheep gives you creative license to do sh*t differently. ~ Andre Hueston Mack