Design History Quotes

I truly believe that we're about to enter a second golden age of design. The first one was in the '50s and '60s, when designers like Raymond Loewy, Charles Eames, George Nelson and Dieter Rams were shepherds of the brands they were working with. They had influence over the products and how companies communicated and promoted themselves.

The Hewitt sisters were these amazing - both sort of philanthropists and dilettantes who went out and single-handedly collected all of these of-the-moment designs in wallpaper and textiles and in graphic design in order to teach people about design.

I grew up in a time when Eames and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects were putting their furniture and objects on the market. You could buy some of those objects on the open market. Eames was a huge influence on all of us in school.

I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making.

Information design has been around since the 1970s. Pioneers like Yale University design guru Edward Tufte and design agency Pentagram have long known and used its power. But now with the rise of the Internet, it's having something of a second birth.

So much in design is presented as a big miracle when it's just a repetition of what's been happening for 80 years.

My place in design history is to sort of interpret youth culture, and I think we've seen that done in fashion before - it's not a new concept - but it hasn't been done with the same vigour in a modern context.

Since an early age, I've been intrigued by the idea of design evolution.

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?

I love every period in design history. Even the ugly ones.

For a century, everyone assumed that the iconic Tiffany lamps were conceived and designed by that American master of stained glass. Not so! It was a woman!