170 Graphic Design Quotes

Following is our list of graphic design quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about inspiring graphic design.

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Famous Graphic Design Quotes

Graphic Design is the communication of information in an appropriate visual manner. — Massimo Vignelli

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

Commercial Art tries to make you buy things. Graphic Design gives you ideas. — Chip Kidd

I see graphic design as the organization of information that is semantically correct, syntactically consistent and pragmatically understandable. — Massimo Vignelli

Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does. - David Carson

Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does. — David Carson

Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take. — Chip Kidd

Design is thinking made visual. — Saul Bass

Good design is good business. — Thomas J. Watson

The challenge is for the graphic designer to turn data into information and information into messages of meaning. — Katherine McCoy

Designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organising and manipulating of words and pictures. — Jeffrey Veen

Design is the key to everything. If you learn how to design you can do anything. — Doug Cranmer

Design is everything. Everything! - Paul Rand

Design is everything. Everything! — Paul Rand

The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design. — Steven Johnson

Providing, meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures - it is the designer's job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting. — Paul Rand

Design is in everything we make, but it's also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy. — Erik Adigard

Short Graphic Design Quotes

  • Great design is serious, not solemn — Paula Scher
  • Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated. — Paul Rand
  • To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master. — Milton Glaser
  • Good art inspires; Good design motivates. — Otl Aicher
  • Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries. — Neville Brody
  • Design isn't just about making things beautiful; it's also about making things work beautifully. — Roger Martin
  • Design is not art. Design is utilitarian, art is not. — Massimo Vignelli
  • You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt... or in front of a piece of graphic design. — Stefan Sagmeister
  • No one loves authenticity like a graphic designer. And no one is quite as good at simulating it. — Michael Bierut
  • Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem. — John Maeda

Graphic Design Image Quotes

Graphic design quote Some people look for a beautiful place, others make a place beautiful.
Some people look for a beautiful place, others make a place beautiful.

Creative Graphic Design Quotes

There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence. — Massimo Vignelli

You can do a good ad without good typography, but you can't do a great ad without good typography. — Herb Lubalin

If you can design one thing, you can design everything. - Massimo Vignelli

If you can design one thing, you can design everything. — Massimo Vignelli

Graphic design quote Good design is obvious, great design is transparent.
Good design is obvious, great design is transparent.

The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness. — Massimo Vignelli

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense. — Bruno Munari

Simplicity, carried to an an extreme, becomes elegance. — Jon Franklin

Graphic design quote Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak
Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. — James Whistler

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. — Jim Jarmusch

Select only things to steal that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent — Jim Jarmusch

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. — Howard Aiken

Inspiring Graphic Design Quotes

It's through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good. — Paula Scher

Creating is about sharing ideas, sharing aesthetics, sharing what you believe in with other people. — Shepard Fairey

I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares, as opposed to ugly things. That's my intent. — Saul Bass

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

What's the use of being legible, when nothing inspires you to take notice of it? — Wolfgang Weingart

The most popular typefaces are the easiest to read; their popularity has made them disappear from conscious cognition. It becomes impossible to tell if they are easy to read because they are commonly used, or if they are commonly used because they are easy to read. — Zuzana Licko

You can't do better design with a computer, but you can speed up your work enormously. — Wim Crouwel

Graphic design quote If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan.
If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan.

Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores: if the one you're with isn't doing the job, there's always, always, always another. — Chip Kidd

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

They must find it difficult ... those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than truth as the authority. — Gerald Massey

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

Graphic Design Inspiration Quotes

Design is the application of intent - the opposite of happenstance, and an antidote to accident. — Robert L. Peters

It's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better. — Jonathan Ive

Don't worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop. — Jeffrey Zeldman

Graphic design quote Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because the idea wasn't theirs.
Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because the idea wasn't theirs.

Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future. — Robert L. Peters

If design isn't profitable, then it's art. — Henrik Fisker

Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous. — Ralph Caplan

Graphic design quote Good design is as little design as possible.
Good design is as little design as possible.

Inspiration the seed. Design but the flower. — Michael Langham

Do work you love and are passionate about, look outside of the world of graphic design for inspiration. — Jessica Walsh

Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order — Victor Papanek

To create a memorable design you need to start with a thought that's worth remembering. — Thomas Manss

Graphic Art Quotes

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist - Francis of Assisi

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist — Francis of Assisi

The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design. — Massimo Vignelli

Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy. — Jan Tschichold

Graphic design quote Design is where science and art break even.
Design is where science and art break even.

The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive. — Vladimir Lenin

The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything which is already finished, already made, already existing in the world - it is a symbol of a new world, which is being built upon and which exists by way of people. — El Lissitzky

The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects. — Wassily Kandinsky

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

The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail. — John Wesley Powell

Art is the only place you can do what you like. That's freedom. — Paula Rego

Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader. The good type-designer therefore realizes that, for a new font to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty. — Stanley Morison

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

Graphic Artist Quotes

Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out. — Anthony Bourdain

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

The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong. — Marty Neumeier

Graphic design quote Design is thinking made visual.
Design is thinking made visual.

There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools. — Eric Gill

The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring. — Paul Rand

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual. — Edward Tufte

Graphic design quote Luck is the residue of design.
Luck is the residue of design.

I wanted to show that an African-American artist could make it in this country on a national level in the graphic arts. I want to be a strong role model for my family and for other African Americans. — Jerry Pinkney

I have to perfect my beard every morning and it takes a long time. I think a lot of musicians are into graphic design and art. I decided to be a little bit of an artist on my face. — Craig David

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. — Jim Jarmusch

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. — Steve Jobs

Graphic Quotes

Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay. — Adrian Frutiger

An electrician isn't an opinion former, but a graphic designer is. My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That's our job. — Neville Brody

Asymmetry is the rhythmic expression of funtional design. In addition to being more logical, asymmetry has the advantage that its complete appearance is far more optically effective than symmetry. — Jan Tschichold

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

For me, typography is a triangular relationship between design idea, typographic elements, and printing technique. — Wolfgang Weingart

I like to step into areas where I am afraid. Fear is a sign that I am going in the right direction. — April Greiman

We`re not here for a long time, we`re here for a good time / Reach For the Sky, 'cause tomorrow may never come. — Mike Ness

For after all, a poster does more than simply supply information on the goods it advertises; it also reveals a society’s state of mind — Armin Hofmann

Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused. - Darren Aronofsky

Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused. — Darren Aronofsky

Birds in flight fascinate me. I admire eagles and falcons. I’m inspired by a feather but also its color, its graphics, its weightlessness and its engineering. It’s so elaborate. In fact I try and transpose the beauty of a bird to women. — Alexander McQueen

Web Design Quotes

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect - to help people work together - and not as a technical toy. — Tim Berners-Lee

Websites promote you 24/7: No employee will do that. — Paul Cookson

Our weavings in the cosmic web are not self-contained. Rather, they are part of the design of our collective humanity. — Lisa Hunt

Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores. — Chip Kidd

Good Web design is about the character of the content, not the character of the designer. — Jeffrey Zeldman

I love the fact that I work with everything that has to do with the brand, the product, the environment, the online, the architecture, the web design, because I am somebody that loves making things, making experiences, creating things that people love to engage with. — Christopher Bailey

The usability tests we have conducted during the last year have shown an increasing reluctance among users to accept innovations in Web design. The prevailing attitude is to request designs that are similar to everything else people see on the Web. — Jakob Nielsen

Great web design without functionality is like a sports car with no engine. — Paul Cookson

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity. — Jeffrey Zeldman

Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows. Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we'll build websites for the decade to come. — Jeffrey Veen

Design And Art Quotes

The Jiu Jitsu I created was designed to give the weak ones a chance to face the heavy and strong. — Helio Gracie

For me fashion is an expression of art that is very closely related both to me and to my body. I see it as an expression of identity combined with desire, moods and a cultural setting. — Iris van Herpen

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick). — Robert Hooke

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth — Frank Lloyd Wright

I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it. — Frank Lloyd Wright

The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing. — Bruno Munari

Having no purpose is the function of art, so somebody else can look at it and ask a question. Design is different - you're supposed to understand what's going on. You can be delighted by it, intrigued by it, but you're supposed to know it's a hot dog stand. — Paula Scher

When I see beautiful clothes, I want to keep them, preserve them... Clothes, like architecture and art, reflect an era. — Azzedine Alaia

Ninety percent of games lose money; 10 percent make a lot of money. And there's a consistency around the competitive advantages you create, so if you can actually learn how to do the art, the design, and the programming, you would be consistently very profitable. — Gabe Newell

Interior Design Quotes

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture. - Peter York

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture. — Peter York

You create your own decoration. You choose your color, you choose your mood. ... If you are depressed, you put some bright yellow and suddenly you are happy. — Philippe Starck

Beige is atmosphere. It's bisque, it's ivory, it's cream, it's stone, it's toast, it's cappuccino. It;s well, it's magic. — Albert Hadley

I am going to design, in a great hurry, and I believe to build a station after my own fancy; that is, with engineering roofs, etc. etc. It is at Paddington, in cutting, and admitting of no exterior, all interior and all roofed in. — Isambard Kingdom Brunel

I am going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life. — Elsie De Wolfe

One sits more comfortably on a colour that one likes. — Verner Panton

It wasn't that I had any great dream of being an architect. I just wanted to make things. Whether it was furniture, painting, interior design, or architecture. I just wanted to create something. — Tadao Ando

I'm an artist, a designer, a craftsman, interior designer, half-architect. There's no one name that fits me very well. — Dale Chihuly

The main purpose of my work is to provoke people into using their imagination and make their surroundings more exciting. — Verner Panton

Luxury starts where functionality ends and where the true value is personal and so has no price or reason. — Marcel Wanders

Graphic Novels Quotes

I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books. — Matthew Vaughn

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling. — Ted Rall

If I had to rank my skills, I have a long way to go before I can write a good graphic novel. — Ted Rall

I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel. — Ted Rall

Oh, I’m nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading, and I’m nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I’m working on right now. It’s a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare, and it’s going to be fun. — Billy Campbell

The 'Barnaby' books were always intended to be graphic novels. — Janet Evanovich

People unacquainted with graphic novels, including journalists, tend to think of Watchmen as a book by Alan Moore that happens to have some illustrations. And that does a disservice to the entire form. — Dave Gibbons

Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever. — Jon Scieszka

As you know, transforming such a big book [The Gunslinger Born] into graphic novel format is really a process of translation. — Robin Furth

People are so afraid to say the word "comic". It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to "graphic novel" and that disappears. — Marjane Satrapi

People Writing About Graphic Design

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Read quotes by Massimo Vignelli

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Read quotes by Paul Rand

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Read quotes by Michael Bierut

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Read quotes by Chip Kidd

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Read quotes by David Carson

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Read quotes by Saul Bass

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More Graphic Design Quotes

Logos are a graphic extension of the internal realities of a company. — Saul Bass

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty. — Emil Ruder

To design is to plan, to order, to relate, and to control. In short, it opposes all means of disorder and accident. — Emil Ruder

Berthold is still a good typeface, but even Berthold has some less than attractive features, and then I just cut them off because I didn't like them. — Wolfgang Weingart

Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is. — Chip Kidd

I have never seen a game's graphics look so sharp and clean. The sound design for the game is also unique on the Xbox. The memory on this system allowed us to provide the user with 5.1 Dolby surround sound for home theatre owners. — Don Bluth

3 requirements for a good designer: 1. genuine knowledge and love of great design. 2. sound knowledge of principles and techniques of communication. 3. heart (passion). — Lester Beall

In Conclusion

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