William A. Dembski Quotes

It seems to be a law of design that for every advantage introduced through redesign, there is an accompanying unintended disadvantage.

In my opinion, no single design is apt to be optimal for everyone.

There's a saying in the software design industry: "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two."

Fill a space in a beautiful way.

My work first engaged with the early russian avant-garde; the paintings of moholy-nagy, el lissitzky's 'prouns' and naum gabo's sculptures, but in particular with the work of kasimir malevitch - he was an early influence for me as a representative of the modern avant-garde intersection between art and design.

What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

There's this idea that it's all natural, but everything's been staged to look natural. It is also an invention. It's just that my inventions are different. I often get asked about my artifice, but isn't fashion based on the idea that we can create a fantasy?

Design has to work. Art does not.

Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, 'My language is perfect. It can do everything.' But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language-how we feel while programming.

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.

Every disruptive innovation is powered by a simplifying technology, and then the technology has to get embedded in a different kind of a business model. The first two decades of digital computing were characterized by the huge mainframe computers that filled a whole room, and they had to be operated by PhD Computer Scientists. It took the engineers at IBM about four years to design these mainframe computers because there were no rules. It was an intuitive art and just by trial and error and experimentation they would evolve to a computer that worked.

In terms of their basic biochemical design....no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.

Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend such time in design that there are none.

Lighting is everything in a color.

Form is never more than an extension of content.

Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.

I attended the Columbus College Of Art & Design for a little while, until I realized they didn't take cartooning very seriously.

Our design, not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject, not manual, but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena.

Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique - these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation .

Beauty is all about form; proportions and the relationships between one line and another.

The art of compromise centers on the willingness to give up something in order to get something else in return. Successful artists get more than they give up.

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