Thoughts about Design, Style & Creativity

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.

How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.

Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.

Do not seek praise. Seek criticism.

If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, empathize, synthesize, and glean insights that enable him or her to ‘make the invisible visible.

Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.

Those who don’t build must burn.

It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and, yes, beauty to people’s lives.

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

If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.

You don’t think your way to creative work. You work your way to creative thinking.

If you do it right, it will last forever.

I have several times made a poor choice by avoiding a necessary confrontation

Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Creativity is to discover a question that has never been asked. If one brings up an idiosyncratic question, the answer he gives will necessarily be unique as well.

Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.

There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.

Design everything on the assumption that people are not heartless or stupid but marvelously capable, given the chance.

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Leave it better than you found it.

There is no such thing as a boring project. There are only boring executions.

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

The time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.

Simplicity, wit, and good typography.

Design is more important than technology in most consumer applications.

Practice safe design: Use a concept.

They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.

The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic ‘right-brain’ thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.

The details are not the details. They make the design.

Great design is a multi-layered relationship between human life and its environment.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Creativity is only as obscure as your reference.

Get in over your head as often and as joyfully as possible.

Design is so simple. That’s why it’s so complicated.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.

No. I don’t think the Empire had Wookiees in mind when they designed it, Chewie.

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.

A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.

Design isn’t crafting a beautiful textured button with breathtaking animation. It’s figuring out if there’s a way to get rid of the button altogether.

I would be happy to learn just half the stuff I already thought I learned

Put hot triggers in the path of motivated people.

The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.

As we decrease uncertainty, we give ourselves permission to increase fidelity.

Curiosity about life in all its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.

Less is more work.

Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Y’all talk about UX like it’s just another feature. For a user, it literally is the product. Full stop. Everything else is inside baseball

Design and art are independent coordinates that provide their greatest satisfactions when experienced simultaneously.

Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem: the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints.

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.

When you believe a thing, believe it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.

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

The soul never thinks without an image.

Do good work for good people

Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.