There are many ways to get inspired these days. For designers, looking through design pieces around the internet help them grow their ideas for current or future projects. Though sometimes when you’re down, it doesn’t matter if you are designers or not some quotes or phrase can inspire you to move forward and think creatively.

In this article, we have selected 75+ various design quotes. Some you will recognize coming from the great artist like Pablo Picasso. Others are inspiring quotes created by designers across the world based on their mindset.

Picasso Type – Quote by Picasso

Design’s fundamental role is problem solver.

- Fast Company, 2005

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

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

- Steve Jobs, 2003

Pablo Picasso

If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.

- Red Adair

Invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

- Thomas Edison

…designers can make life more bearable by producing stuff that touches its audience rather than fucks them in the head.

- Jon Wozencraft

Dead Serious

Good design is good business.

- Thomas J. Watson Jr.

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

- Victor Papanek

A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.

- Brenda Laurel

Creativity

You are what you are seen to be.

- Erik Spiekermann

To say that something is designed means it has intentions that go beyond its function. Otherwise it’s just planning.

- Ayse Birsel

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Sweet In The Sour

Truly elegant design incorporates top-notch functionality into a simple, uncluttered form.

- David Lewis

Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

- Orson Welles

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

- Pablo Picasso

Excellence – Aristotle

Design is as much a matter of finding problems as it is solving them.

- Bryan Lawson

Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.

- Judy Garland

The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

- Tom Waits

Person You Are

Good art inspires; Good design motivates.

- Otl Aicher

Color is a creative element, not a trimming.

- Piet Zwart

Sometimes you can draw more inspiration from the people who don’t believe in you, then from the ones who do.

- William Childs

You Learn Something New Everyday

Education is not the answer to the question. Education is the means to the answer to all questions.

- William Allin

Design is where science and art break even.

- Robin Mathew

I’m convinced that without bad design, the world would be a far less stimulating place; we would have nothing to marvel over and nothing to be nostalgic about.

- Carrie Philips

Typography

The definition of an expert is someone who knows what not to do.

- Charles Willson

Practice safe design: Use a concept.

- Petrula Vrontikis

Just because something looks good doesn’t mean it’s useful. And just because something is useful does not make it beautiful.

- Joshua Brewer

Never Tell Me

Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere.

- Mieke Gerritzen

When you eliminate quality as a requirement, the entire design process becomes a whole lot easier.

- Jared M. Spool

If you’re more susceptible to interruption, you do more out of the box thinking.

- Don Norman

Life Is…

By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.

- Kent Beck

You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt… or in front of a piece of graphic design.

- Stefan Sagmeister

I don’t think that design needs theory, but I think designers need theory.

- Johanna Drucker

The Only Thing Worse

Design is the contrast of the core of limitations therefore there are no boundaries. It is simply an interpretation of creativity.

- Jenaiha Woods

Don’t worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop.

- Jeffrey Zeldman

Simplicity does not mean want or poverty. It does not mean the absence of any decor, or absolute nudity. It only means that the decor should belong intimately to the design proper, and that anything foreign to it should be taken away.

- Paul Jacques Grillo

Fight With Tools

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work & an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

- Frank Llyod Wright

Design is creativity with strategy.

- Rob Curedale

There ain’t no rules around here. We’re trying to accomplish something.

- Thomas Edison

BeAmazing

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

- Tate Linden

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

Wisdom is to knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it.

- David Starr

Compassion Will Cure…

Designers have a dual duty; contractually to their clients and morally to the later users and recipients of their work.

- Hans Hger

Imitation may be the “sincerest form of plagiarism,” but it is also the mark of an inferior person.

- David Ogilvy

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

- Paul Klee

Rising Sun

Some designers create things to show you what they did. I design things to tell you what I solved.

-  Brian Yerkes

The quality of any creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge.

- John Gruber

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

- Leonardo da Vinci

Quotation 6

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word: excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

- Pearl S. Buck

Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.

- Chris Bangle

The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.

- Neil Gaiman

Mr.Mandela Said…

Designing a product is designing a relationship.

- Steve Rogers

The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire, and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes and even modest talent with those characteristics grows.

- Milton Glaser

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

- Pablo Picasso

Reminders

I never design a building before I’ve seen the site and met the people who will be using it.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

I don’t design clothes, I design dreams.

- Ralph Lauren

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.

- Charles Eames

Worth Having

We hope you can be inspired and motivated by the quotes in this post. Join and tell us which is your favorite one or if you have your own quotes, feel free to write it down on the comments. In the meantime here’s mine.

You can’t reach the top before you start climbing from the bottom

- Ari Suardiyanti