120 Software Design Quotes

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

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Famous Software Design Quotes

Design is a process - an intimate collaboration between engineers, designers, and clients. — Henry Dreyfuss

Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline. — William J. Clinton

Design... is the integration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. — Steve Jobs

Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs

... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed. — Dennis Ritchie

The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple. — Grady Booch

The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build. — Bjarne Stroustrup

Hiring people to write code to sell is not the same as hiring people to design and build durable, usable, dependable software. — Larry Constantine

Generally, the craft of programming is the factoring of a set of requirements into a a set of functions and data structures. — Douglas Crockford

Design is everything. Everything! - Paul Rand

Design is everything. Everything! — Paul Rand

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

Good design is good business. — Thomas J. Watson

A design isn't finished until someone is using it. — Brenda Laurel

The best design is the simplest one that works. — Albert Einstein

Short Software Design Quotes

  • Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries. — Neville Brody
  • The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design. — Steven Johnson
  • Good design means as little design as possible. — Dieter Rams
  • Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order — Victor Papanek
  • The hardest part of design ... is keeping features out. — Donald A. Norman
  • Designing is not a profession but an attitude... Thinking in relationships. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
  • Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking. — Milton Glaser
  • Design is thinking made visual. — Saul Bass
  • Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware. — Ken Olsen
  • Design isn't just about making things beautiful; it's also about making things work beautifully. — Roger Martin

Software Design Image Quotes

Software 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.

Design Process Quotes

It's a truly disgusting idea that the creator of the universe - capable of inventing the laws of physics and designing the evolutionary process - that this protégé of supernatural intellect couldn't think of a better way to forgive our sins than to have himself tortured to death. — Richard Dawkins

A century ago, most of today's processed foods didn't even exist. Now they are more than half of the American diet. We weren't designed for this. — Will Bulsiewicz

Love is a romantic designation for a most ordinary biological process-or, shall we say, chemical-process ... a lot of nonsense is talked and written about it. — Greta Garbo

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

Good design is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer. — Dieter Rams

The mantra of any good security engineer is: "Security is a not a product, but a process." It's more than designing strong cryptography into a system; it's designing the entire system such that all security measures, including cryptography, work together. — Bruce Schneier

Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. Aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process. — Paul Rand

Software 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

A profound design process eventually makes the patron, the architect, and every occasional visitor in the building a slightly better human being. — Juhani Pallasmaa

It's not clear whether the brain actually is designed to have nightmares or whether this is actually the process going awry. — Matthew Walker

Design is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

You can't buy something which does not exist. In a way, let's make things exist and then judge later. Don't cancel the process of creativity too early; let it flow. — Ross Lovegrove

Design Quotes

Leave this world a little better than you found it. — Robert Baden-Powell

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable. — Louis Kahn

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

Software 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.

Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love. — Louis Kahn

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

Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize. — Antonin Scalia

Software 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.

The best way to accomplish serious design ... is to be totally and completely unqualified for the job. — Paula Scher

To live our lives and miss that great purpose we were designed to accomplish is truly a sin. It is inconceivable that we could be bored in a world with so much wrong to tackle, so much ignorance to reach and so much misery we could alleviate — William Wilberforce

Make it like a sunflower. — Steve Jobs

From all these experiences the most important thing I have learned is that legibility and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should be only felt but not perceived by the reader. — Adrian Frutiger

Software Engineering Quotes

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. — Edsger Dijkstra

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. — Edsger Dijkstra

I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine. — Steven Levy

Software 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.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. — Martin Fowler

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. - Donald Knuth

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. — Donald Knuth

When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. — Richard E. Pattis

Copy and paste is a design error. - David Parnas

Copy and paste is a design error. — David Parnas

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. - Niklaus Wirth

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. — Niklaus Wirth

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late. — Seymour Cray

Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence. — Niklaus Wirth

Software Development Quotes

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. — Brian Kernighan

Talk is cheap. Show me the code. - Linus Torvalds

Talk is cheap. Show me the code. — Linus Torvalds

Deep Learning is a form of human-assisted but mostly constraint-driven software development. It works because a particular smooth relaxation of program space allows a surprisingly efficient and effective local search. Something like that, my favorite definition. — Andrej Karpathy

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

The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries. — Marshall McLuhan

Education builds software for your brain. — Edward O. Thorp

The single most important thing for any processor is getting adoption by software developers. — Jensen Huang

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

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop. — Alan Perlis

To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. — Stephen Hawking

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn. — Steve Jobs

I developed some unique software to public it on the web that I call the Folklore Project. — Andy Hertzfeld

Architectural Design Quotes

A dress is a piece of ephemeral architecture, designed to enhance the proportions of the female body. — Christian Dior

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again. — Renzo Piano

I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do. - Frank Gehry

I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do. — Frank Gehry

The Sun does not realise how wonderful it is until after a room is made. - Louis Kahn

The Sun does not realise how wonderful it is until after a room is made. — Louis Kahn

Nothing in this world is more simple and more cheap than making cities that provide better for people. — Jan Gehl

The room is there for the human being - not the human being for the room. - El Lissitzky

The room is there for the human being - not the human being for the room. — El Lissitzky

Software 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.

I like ruins because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing. — Tadao Ando

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

A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities. — Walter Gropius

If you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life. — Frank Lloyd Wright

People Writing About Software Design

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Read quotes by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
quotes on love, life and leadership

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Read quotes by Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs
quotes on leadership, death and innovation

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Read quotes by William J. Clinton

William J. Clinton
quotes on leadership, education and constitution

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Read quotes by Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie
quotes on education, leadership and life

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Read quotes by Grady Booch

Grady Booch
quotes on ai, leadership and knowledge

11 65
Read quotes by Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup
quotes on education, leadership and culture

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More Software Design Quotes

It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. — Albert Einstein

This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0. — Max Tegmark

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris. — Larry Wall

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

The trend of design toward simplicity and accessibility in software happened for a reason—simple sells, simple’s usable and simple scales. — Rand Fishkin

Life 1.0: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of Life 2.0: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do—everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes. — Max Tegmark

Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity. — Christopher Zeeman

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there. — Gordon Bell

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry — Ted Nelson

There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone. — Bjarne Stroustrup

Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent. — Herbert Simon

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture. — Brian Foote

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

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated. — Edsger Dijkstra

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do — Dennis Ritchie

If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful. — Alan Cooper

Know what you're talking about. — George H. W. Bush

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built. — Niklaus Wirth

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days. — Marvin Minsky

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. — Brian Kernighan

An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only. — Bjarne Stroustrup

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. — Tony Hoare

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. — Niklaus Wirth

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity. — Tony Hoare

Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant. — Edmund Burke

The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything before you can do anything. — Larry Wall

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. — Bjarne Stroustrup

There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy. — John Baldacci

Hey, I'm a good software engineer, but I'm not exactly known for my fashion sense. White socks and sandals don't translate to 'good design sense'. — Linus Torvalds

The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [...] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties. — Fernando J. Corbato

Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. — Tony Hoare

Good work is always done in defiance of management. — Bob Woodward

The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard to pay. — Tony Hoare

Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something. — Kent Beck

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. — Donald Knuth

A brute force solution that works is better than an elegant solution that doesn't work. — Steve McConnell

Some cynical people think that every activity must revolve around the mighty dollar, and that anyone saying otherwise is just attempting to delude the public. I will probably never be able to convice them that that isn't always the case, but I do have the satisfaction of knowing that I live in a less dingy world than they do. — John Carmack

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. — Stan Kelly-Bootle

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