David McCandless Quotes

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

One of the most significant design principles is to omit the unimportant in order to emphasize the important.

Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.

I believe consistency and orthogonality are tools of design, not the primary goal in design.

I think there is always a need for pure design. With pure design, you don't need so much decoration.

My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.

Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

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

Our goal is simple objects, objects that you can't imagine any other way.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

Design principle: Take things away until the design breaks, then put that last thing back in.

Good design means as little design as possible.

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'.

People who don’t know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don’t know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life.

A drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.

Simplicity requires ruthlessness.

Eliminate the unnecessary and focus on the substance.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

My goal is to omit everything superfluous so that the essential is shown to best possible advantage.

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

Simplicity is freedom.

Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Simplicity is the final achievement.