Ivan Chermayeff Quotes

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

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

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 think the varied backgrounds in the beginning were a plus. It took a while for people to understand what they were trying to do and get started, but it did provide for a lot of new ideas.

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

That's something I learned in art school. I studied graphic design in Germany, and my professor emphasized the responsibility that designers and illustrators have towards the people they create things for.

If you write your own tools, you can sort of see new things, design new things.

The Swedish engineer who invented the zip fastener made a greater intellectual leap than many scientists do in a lifetime.

To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.

A designer is someone who constructs while he thinks, someone for whom planning and making go together.

If you rely only on experience, you'll simply keep applying old solutions to new problems.

For me, it's not about being the best designer. I'm interested in being the best partner. The best collaborator.

I want to reiterate the fact that at the core of it all, I am a designer, a creator, and as a creative person, I will choose to be limitless in the extension models of my various ideas on design.

We're communicators, we're problem solvers, and we're lateral thinkers, and there's nothing that can't be improved with that. The world needs us, and we want to be needed.

A lot of companies are able to do without design. A few companies are able to do without creativity. A very few. Creativity is crucial to your business.

The essence of creativity is figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think.

Somebody is going to find a way digitally that is just as innovative. In the end, the tools can change, but there is always someone who can think of something cool to do.

For years I thought I was just a writer, but when I sat down to design and started playing around with it, I realized that, really, it's pretty easy. Obviously it's more than just a set of rules, but the basics of design are actually pretty simple and quite mathematical. The link between data and design works at quite a fundamental level.

If you weren’t an optimist, it would be impossible to be an architect.

What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful . . . Great designers also pursue a mission. Great designers design with mankind in mind . . . The crossroads of science and art, innovation and inspiration are what I love about design.

Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

The problem of creating something new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.

I have a lot to learn from designers.

Everything starts with design.

The content could be done anyplace, but the real invention is the architecture. The architecture is the only work that really defines a new way of doing things. I think this point is fundamental.