thoughts on goooood design

We who are clay blended by the Master Potter, come from the kiln of Creation in many hues. How can people say one skin is colored, when each has its own coloration? What should it matter that one bowl is dark and the other pale, if each is of good design and serves its purpose well.
Polingaysi Qoyawayma, Hopi


Good design is serious business.
A.G. Lafley, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive, Procter & Gamble


The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living.
Harry Bertoia


Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beautry to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.
Paola Antonelli


The difference between good design and great design is intelligence.
Tibor Kalman


Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.
Dieter Rams


Good design is innovative Gives a product utility Is aesthetic Makes a product easy to understand Is unobtrusive Is honest Is long-lived Is consistent down to the smallest detail Protects the environment Good design is as little design as possible.
Dieter Rams


Rather than overpowering nature or limiting human impact, good design will affirm the possibility of developing healthy and creatively interactive relationships between human settlements and the natural world.
William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Buildings Like Trees, Cities Like Forests


Good design doesn’t cost, but it pays.
Richard H. Driehaus, Chicago Money Manager and Philanthropist, Richard H. Driehaus Foundation


I love the idea of slowness. It took thousands of years to come to the conclusion that we think of as a chair. Vitra moves fast in comparison to that, but I do think that every object has a natural evolutionary pace. If Charles Eames had said, “We have to finish it fast fast fast!” his chairs wouldn't be relevant a half-century later. I believe in getting things right. In our industry, you can’t force something if you want it to be good. It has to become. Every object is a being with a soul. Our work is to find that soul. Sometimes we can’t manage to find it, and we have to abandon the project or try again. We’re not worried about being first to market, because what we do is unique by its very nature. Good design is relevant for decades; a year matters little on that scale.
Rolf Fehlbaum, CEO, Vitra


Good designers relentlessly generate lots of ideas and open-mindedly consider alternative solutions. At no time are good designers frightened to entertain a crazy, competing, or uncomfortable idea.
Karl Ulrich, CEO, Nova Cruz Products


When you feel the architecture just click, as though it couldn’t have been anything else, it’s due to a true understanding of the site and the plan and section.
Stephen Kanner, Architect


Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain subset of people in the culture) that draws on a shared symbolic expression for the ordering of such goals.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Author of Flow


Good design today requires more vision (a larger point of view versus the single brilliant idea), more consistency (a deeper underlying structure of language and form versus the simple, uniform application of visual elements) and more patience (persistence over time versus creative authoritarianism).
William Drenttel, partner, Jessica Helfand/William Drenttel design


Good design is a form of respect—on the part of the producer for the person who will eventually spend hard-earned cash on the product, use the product, own the product.
David Brown, editor of Gain


Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.
Freeman Thomas, Automobile Designer, DaimlerChrysler


The good designer aims at a perfect fusion of the various considerations which enter into his design. He aims at an untortured unity—a direct whole. He arranges his levels consciously or subconsciously, adhearing to the requisites of the problem he is asked to solve or to his own inclination. Some designers see total act through a disc of aesthetic considerations—others, more practical minded, may put economic considerations at top level.
Leo Lionni, Graphic Designer