Design Clarity Quotes

Products have to be designed in a way that they are comprehensible.

I've never liked to conceptualize too much about fashion, like it was art or science, which it is not. But it's nice when there's a clear idea behind a collection.

Good design makes a product understandable.

You cannot defend your design without knowing what you're designing for.

Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language. A good design should be like a well made sentence and it should only express one idea at a time.

Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product.

Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

A design style is defined by a set of microdecisions. A clear style reflects a consistent set. A clear style may not be a good style; a muddled one never is.

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

What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult - that is, revelation of the complex.

Architects have made architecture too complex. We need to simplify it and use a language that everyone can understand.

Good design is also an act of communication between the designer and the user, except that all the communication has to come about by the appearance of the device itself. The device must explain itself.

I guess when I look over my shoulder at other designers, I feel like people are so definitive. It's so clear to me what their aesthetic is, what they're projecting. And I look at my own work and I think, Who could ever decipher what the hell is going on?

Picasso said that no one has to explain a daffodil. Good design is understandable to virtually everybody. You never have to ask why.

I've been working on a graphic about carbon emissions. It's an incredibly simple graphic - a bunch of blocks and a table below it - but it's taken me three weeks to design. For some reason it just wasn't working. Then finally I realized there was a number present, which I was rendering in each version, that wasn't necessary for the understanding of the piece. This figure was getting in the way and distracting from the main flow of the narrative. As soon as I pulled that graphic out of the design, it sprang into focus. Suddenly it worked.

I like ruins because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing.

The K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle was pounded into my head in school and I still follow it today in most of my designs. I know that my most successful efforts are the simplest. I always find myself trying to subtract detail from design concepts in an attempt to distill the idea down to the most basic communication tool.

I sketch in a way that people can nearly do the dresses without me coming in for a fitting. Every single detail, every proportion, every cut -- everything.