Colleen Atwood Quotes

I'm experimenting in public. At the design grad schools, these are people sitting around in groups, putting their work on a wall, analyzing it and putting it back in a drawer. I think there's little risk in that.

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

I design from instinct. It's the only way I know how to live. What feels good. What feels right. What is needed. Give me a problem and I will approach it creatively, from my gut.

Design must be functional, and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.

I tried a dozen different modifications that were rejected. But they all served as a path to the final design.

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

A small change at the beginning of the design process defines an entirely different product at the end.

We don't design by calculator or by demographics or anything like that. We really are a group of creative, sensitive people. We have our charmed little world where we get to make things. We're really lucky.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

Design is an unknown.

Designing is a matter of concentration. You go deep into what you want to do. It's about intensive research, really. The concentration is warm and intimate and like the fire inside the earth - intense but not distorted. You can go to a place, really feel it in your heart. It's actually a beautiful feeling.

I think about the structure, sure. I think about what's going to happen, and how it's going to happen, and the pace. But I think if I stop to think about it in an abstract sense, I feel very daunted. I just try to enter into the story and feel my way through it. It's a very murky, intuitive way of going about it.

I'm not a mother of children, but I'm a different type of mother where my approach to design is more in line with nature. It's less about dictating and more about editing and listening and allowing something to grow. So I nourish and let the material express what it wants to be.

Designing is always on the mind of a designer, and as I was saying it's a sort of digestive process, so I usually keep it to myself unless I'm collaborating with someone because explaining all the things that are going on in your head can be quite exhausting, especially in the early stages of a project.

I design like I breathe. You don't ask to breathe. It just happens

Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process.

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.

Simple and intuitive design is what inspires and drives me.

I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control.

With products the form is almost the finished piece, but with architecture it is not.

Designing for me is a very complex process. There are many ideas that I want to express in one object, very often contradictory. The creative process in Miu Miu is completely different from that of Prada. Miu Miu is not as complicated and thought out as Prada. Rather than being young, Miu Miu is immediate Prada is very sophisticated and considered; Miu Miu is much more naive. The solution, when I am working on Miu Miu, has to come immediately, instinctively, spontaneously with whatever is available at the moment. If I think three times, I stop.

I've been putting together the story with Rob and putting all the details of it together and looking at all the various designs they have for the toys and stuff, it's pretty exciting.

Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to be considered and fine-tuned and even calculated.