Ivan Chermayeff Quotes

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.

User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.

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.

What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.

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

There's a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We're asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool - if you happen to be a software engineer.

Reducing a product's definition to a list of features and functions ignores the real opportunity - orchestrating technological capability to serve human needs and goals.

Design should not dominate things, should not dominate people. It should help people. That's its role.

Design is people.

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.

Design negotiates between technology, policy, systems, and users.

My mantra is: 'Good design accelerates the adoption of new ideas.'

User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project.

Design is nothing if not decision making.

For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.

Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.

An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.

I've spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don't want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.

You are not designing for yourself, and shouldn't be. Most people using the Web don't understand (most of) what makes it work and don't want to. Design for those people. There are many more of them than you.

You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people.

Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era - it's a process that creates order out of chaos, that renders technology usable to business. Design means being good, not just looking good.

Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing. Whether it's designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design, and even things like how the boards were laid out.

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

That was always my frustration with so many of these shows, because design is not an ambush... it's a relationship. You have to know how people move and live and work to be able to design for them.

I think it's really important to design things with a kind of personality.