Index
Quote library
218 curated quotes on design, simplicity, technology and craft. Each one is ready to become a minimalist typographic wallpaper.
Calm
- Less is more.
- Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
- Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.
- Good design is as little design as possible.
- Whitespace is like air: it is necessary for design to breathe.
- A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- The only way to do great work is to love what you do.
- Don't Panic.
- I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep on looking upward.
- The function of good software is to make the complex appear simple.
- Make it simple, but significant.
- Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.
- Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
- The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
- Optimism is a radical act.
- The power of imagination makes us infinite.
- Simplicity is the final achievement.
- Quality is a product of a liberated mind.
- Don't let yesterday take up too much of today.
- Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
- The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
- Design should never say, 'Look at me.' It should say, 'Look at this.'
- Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.
- Type is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters.
- Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
- Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.
- Everything you can imagine is real.
- The mind is everything. What you think you become.
- The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
- Believe you can and you're halfway there.
- Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.
- It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
- The dreamers are the saviors of the world.
- Minimalism is not a lack of something. It's simply the perfect amount of something.
- Man is what he believes.
- Life is a dream.
- Silence is the language of God.
- Happiness is not something made. It comes from your own actions.
- Beauty lies in simplicity.
- Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
- Hope is the dream of a waking man.
- The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
- The best code is no code at all.
- Science is what we can explain to a computer. Art is everything else.
- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
- Simplicity is not the absence of clutter. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product.
- We try to make very few things. We try to make very, very few products.
- Our goal is to design in such a way that people feel as if there was no design at all.
- Good design is innovative.
- Good design makes a product useful.
- Good design is long-lasting.
- Less, but better.
- Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.
- Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together.
- Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.
- If you can design one thing, you can design everything.
- We want to eliminate the unimportant to give room to the important.
- I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares, as opposed to ugly things. That's my intent.
- Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts.
- Complication is a sign of immaturity.
- There are three responses to a piece of design — yes, no, and wow. Wow is the one to aim for.
- Seeing comes before words.
- Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
- Simplicity is the soul of efficiency.
- Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
- The most important part of a design is the part that is left out.
- Design is intelligence made visible.
- Technology is best when it brings people together.
- Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Simplicity is not a goal, but you arrive at it inevitably as you approach the real meaning of things.
Serious
- Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
- The details are not the details. They make the design.
- Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
- The computer is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
- Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
- The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
- Confusion and clutter are the failure of design, not the attributes of users.
- Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
- Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
- Design is a formal response to a strategic question.
- Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.
- The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
- Complexity is a sign of technical debt.
- Data! Data! Data! I cannot make bricks without clay.
- Simplicity must be earned.
- First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.
- Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Be so good they can't ignore you.
- Do, or do not. There is no try.
- I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
- Don't count the days, make the days count.
- Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
- Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
- If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.
- Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
- Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
- Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
- The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.
- We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
- The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee.
- Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.
- An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
- We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
- If you don't build your dream, someone will hire you to build theirs.
- Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
- Keep it simple, stupid.
- Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Freedom is not doing what one wants, but wanting what one should do.
- Knowledge is power.
- The art of living is nothing but the art of knowing how to die.
- Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.
- Art is the lie that enables us to recognize the truth.
- The unexamined life is not worth living.
- Design is how it works.
- The computer is the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
- Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is decoration.
- A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.
- The question of whether machines can think is as relevant as whether submarines can swim.
- Programs must be written for people to read.
- I'm not a great programmer; I'm a good programmer with great habits.
- The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed.
- Information wants to be free.
- Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.
- Cypherpunks write code.
- Trust the math, not the institutions.
- Code is law.
- Encryption is the ultimate form of non-violent resistance.
- Surveillance is the business model of the internet.
- The matrix is everywhere. It is all around us.
- Decentralize or be controlled.
- The interface is the ideology.
- The problem is not that our desires are satisfied or not. The problem is that we do not know what we desire.
- The greatest danger is not passivity, but pseudo-activity.
- Cynicism is not the opposite of ideology. It is ideology in its purest form.
- Attention is all you need.
- Software is eating the world.
- All models are wrong, but some are useful.
- The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
- It's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.
- Objects and their manufacture are inseparable. You understand a product if you understand how it's made.
- Good design is honest.
- Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
- Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.
- I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.
- The long path from material through function to creative work has only one goal: to create order out of the desperate confusion of our time.
- Don't try to be original. Just try to be good.
- The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.
- There is no bad architecture. There is only architecture that is not yet good.
- Design is a response to social change.
- Nothing is invented from nothing.
- The designer must think of himself, first and foremost, as a good citizen.
- Drawing is thinking.
- Form ever follows function.
- Design adds value faster than it adds costs.
- Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.
- Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.
- Above all else, show the data.
- If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.
- Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.
- One more thing...
- There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer.
- We are creating a society in which the individual is a user, not a citizen.
- The technology is a means to an end, and often that end is total control.
- There is no justice in following unjust laws.
- Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
- With great power comes great responsibility.
- Fake it until you make it.
Chaotic
- Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.
- Talk is cheap. Show me the code.
- It’s not a bug. It’s an undocumented feature.
- Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.
- Move fast and break things.
- In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
- There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
- Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer.
- To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.
- Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries.
- Creativity is intelligence having fun.
- I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
- Chaos is a ladder.
- Entropy requires no maintenance.
- One man's constant is another man's variable.
- Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it's bad.
- Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.
- I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
- There is no such thing as a boring project. There are only boring executions.
- A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it's not that good.
- I would rather die of passion than of boredom.
- Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Stay foolish, but don't be stupid.
- Hell is other people.
- There is nothing more terrible than ignorance in action.
- Time is a river that carries me along, but I am the river.
- Man is a wolf to man.
- In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry.
- Debugging is like being the detective where you are also the murderer.
- The most dangerous phrase is: 'We've always done it this way.'
- The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
- On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
- The street finds its own uses for things.
- You are not the user. You are the product.
- The system isn't broken. It was built this way.
- There is no spoon.
- More human than human.
- The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
- They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.
- Design is so simple. That's why it's so complicated.
- If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.
- Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
- It works on my machine.
- A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history.
- A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
- User interfaces are like jokes. If you have to explain them, they aren't that good.
- The problem with troubleshooting is that the trouble shoots back.
- Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
- rm -rf /
- Delete your account.