Design Relevance Quotes

Everything we design is a response to the specific climate and culture of a particular place.

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

I think maybe that as time goes by there will be more newness but because I was part of what it was before it's not like coming into a house and saying it's all about me. I don't feel like that. It really is all about McQueen and the things that he was trying to say and about moving that forward, making it relevant, making it desirable, making it into what people want to wear.

Graphic Design, which fulfills aesthetic needs, complies with the laws of form and exigencies of two-dimensional space; which speaks in semiotics, sans-serifs, and geometrics; which abstracts, transforms, translates, rotates, dilates, repeats, mirrors, groups, and regroups, is not good design if it is irrelevant.

Design certainly has a cosmetic, aesthetic aim. It always aims at making things beautiful. But relevance is just as important. I often say, 'If it isn't ethical, it can't be beautiful. But if it isn't beautiful, it probably shouldn't be at all.'

I don't believe that classical architecture is enough to engage people anymore. They say: 'So what else is new?'

Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.

The most powerful element is that a designer has to reflect the times. So often you can only sense a change, and not really understand until much later its significance.

That era of designers being away with the fairies is gone... You've got to live in the real world.

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.

I happen to like selling clothes as much as creating them. It isn't relevant unless it sells.

My old vintage designs are so popular now. I must have been on to something.

Many feel that sitting at a screen sweating over the design of handrail details for the next cute downtown boutique hotel just doesn't make sense when more than 150,000 people have lost their lives, more than five million people have been made homeless and whole towns have been swept away.

There is a danger when every building has to look spectacular; to look like it is changing the world. I don't care how a building looks if it means something, not to architects, but to the people who use it.

I think taking design out of the studio and really having a relationship with the people that you're making it for really convinced me of how powerful a thing design is. It's not just an aesthetic decoration.

Providing, meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures - it is the designer's job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting.

Somebody who's designing something for himself has at least got a market of one that he's very close to.

Are there a lot of designers that matter? The industry hasn’t got a litmus test any more. The whole thing has imploded. Watch it die, like the banking industry

I don't really care what a designer has to say.

Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it.

The best technology is aimed far enough in the future that it stands out, but close enough to the present that it blends in.

Having one foot in design and the other in sustainable and social projects, I hear this question quite often: 'Why does the world need another chair?' My answer is that the world needs another chair/bicycle/car or any new product for that matter, like the world needs another book.

I not only enjoy it, I think, how do you design things that are applicable to life - unless you live it?