If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: it took us 5000 years to put wheels on our luggage. |

The problem with quick and dirty, is that the dirty remains long after the quick has been forgotten. |

Standards are like toothbrushes, everybody agrees you should have one, but no one wants to use yours. |

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

Design to express, not to impress. |

Confusion and clutter are the failure of design, not the attributes of information. |

Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability – they should go hand in hand. |

The most common user action on a website is to flee. |

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up. |

You can fix it now on the drafting board with an eraser or you can fix it later on the construction site with a sledge hammer. |

The room is there for the human being - not the human being for the room. |

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

If everyone likes your design, it's banal. Mediocrity shirks offense. Art dares it. |

A prototype is a question, embodied. |

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. |

There’s the whole Buddhist thing about the essence of a bowl being its emptiness—that’s why it’s useful. Its emptiness allows it to hold something. I guess that means that design must talk about something else. If you make design about design, you’re just stacking bowls, and that’s not what bowls are for. |

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

If you do it right, it will last forever. |

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other. |

There is really nothing more to say – except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how. |

A line is a dot that went for a walk.
Drawing is taking a line for a walk. |

Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the ‘things’ that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name. |

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. |

The cost of changing things afterward is much higher than the cost of better preparation. |