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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize. — Antonin Scalia
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
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
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
When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. — Richard E. Pattis
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
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
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
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
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
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
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of software design quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about software design to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of software design quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.