David McCandless Quotes

I didn't think that personal style had much value in graphic design.

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

Graphic design was largely about communication in an artistic or creative manner, much like writing is used to convey ideas. Many designers completely miss that aspect of the "art." Some are completely satisfied with just making things pretty, without taking the communication element into consideration.

I'm fascinated with design. I realized early that I had no talent in that direction, but I love talking with architects and designers about what they do. I appreciate applied creativity as a source of pleasure and meaning.

Everyone wants to be a designer.

Designis a revelation to me. It's like taking something that is not alive and giving it form, shape, substance, and life.

When I studied graphic design, I learned a valuable lesson: There's no perfect answer to the puzzle, and creativity is a renewable resource.

Designing was an effortless exercise and something I always enjoyed.

Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.

The artist in me cries out for design.

You think about the beauty and what you want to transmit. If I think about designing, I can't design.

Pictures, abstract symbols, materials, and colors are among the ingredients with which a designer or engineer works. To design is to discover relationships and to make arrangements and rearrangements among these ingredients.

Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.

This is what I like about being a designer: You can't really get it until you see it.

If you want to communicate something, you'd better make sure that your design piece is well-dressed and that its teeth are fixed. At the same time, I still believe that if it is only stylistically great and it has nothing to say, it still is not going to make a lasting impression on anybody.

I don't design. I get what I think is a big idea, and I put the idea down. I'm not a designer. I'm a communicator.

I studied digital arts and graphic design, and then, at the same time I was studying, I was still doing auditions.

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way

News is almost more interesting to me than other people's fiction, if that makes sense. But other people's fiction in terms of design is still incredibly interesting to me.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.

The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture... Sometimes... it seems to me that... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

I like the idea that people get engaged thinking about design, about creativity. I don't see how it could possibly be bad.

I used to do jacket design, and I'm very conscious of covers, and probably meddle more than other authors would.