Last Updated: December 21, 2022 by Quote.cc Team
We all need a bit of inspiration from time to time. Who doesn’t? Especially when it comes to design, it’s often a remarkable and essential ingredient. Creating beautiful, thought-provoking designs requires both passion and skill. Creativity is all around us – in the homes we live in, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, and the food we eat. True masters of design can expertly mix their talent with their creativity.
If you work as a graphic designer, interior designer, fashion designer, or in any other creative field, inspiration is the key to success. Inspiration can often be elusive, but reading this collection of design quotes is guaranteed to boost your creativity.
Whether you’re searching for some inspiration to begin a new project or require some wisdom from some of the greats, we’ve gathered 200 famous design quotes from the top designers of our time. Each reflects the past trials, pitfalls, roadblocks, and triumphs of designers who eventually came out on top. Heed their words, and you might follow in their footsteps.
200 Quotes About Design And Creativity
Top 10 Design Quotes
“Bad design is smoke, while good design is a mirror.” – Juancarlos Fernandez
“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.” – Jeffrey Zeldman
“Every great design begins with an even better story.” – Lorinda Mamo
“The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is to cure it somehow, with design.” – Massimo Vignelli
“The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.” – Paul Rand
“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” – Walt Disney
“Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.” – Elon Musk
“Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.” – Dieter Rams
“I don’t design clothes, I design dreams.” – Ralph Lauren
“Luck is the residue of design.” – Branch Rickey
What is Design?
“Design is where science and art break even.” – Robin Mathew
“Design is thinking made visual.” – Saul Bass
“Design is the search for a magical balance between business and art; art and craft; intuition and reason; concept and detail; playfulness and formality; client and designer; designer and printer; and printer and public.” – Valerie Pettis
“Design is the intermediary between information and understanding.” – Hans Hoffman
“Design is so simple. That’s why it’s so complicated.” – Paul Rand
“Design is so simple. That’s why it is so complicated.” – Paul Rand
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs
“Design is not a single object or dimension. Design is messy and complex.” – Natasha Jen
“Design is more than just a few tricks to the eye. It’s a few tricks to the brain.” – Neville Brody
“Design is more important than technology in most consumer applications.” – Dave McClure
“Design is intelligence made visible.” – Alina Wheeler
“Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.” – Erik Adigard
“Design is everything. Everything!” – Paul Rand
“Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.” – Ellen Lupton
“Design is as much a matter of finding problems as it is solving them.” – Bryan Lawson
“Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.” – Tate Linden
“Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.” – John Maeda
“Design is a formal response to a strategic question.” – Mariona Lopez
“Design everything on the assumption that people are not heartless or stupid but marvelously capable, given the chance.” – John Chris Jones
“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.” – Robert L. Peters
“Design can be art. Design can be simple. That’s why it’s so complicated.” – Paul Rand
“Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.” – Paul Rand
“Design and art are independent coordinates that provide their greatest satisfactions when experienced simultaneously.” – Milton Glaser
“Design adds value faster than it adds costs.” – Joel Spolsky
“Design isn’t crafting a beautiful textured button with breathtaking animation. It’s figuring out if there’s a way to get rid of the button altogether.” – Edward Tufte
“Design transcends agenda. It speaks to the politics of optimism.” – Paul Bennett
“Something I say to people who ask about how I view art and design as different is this: art is like masturbation. It’s selfish and introverted and done for you and you alone. Design is like sex, in that there is someone else involved, their needs are just as important as your own, and if everything goes right, both parties are happy in the end.” – Colin Wright
Famous Design Quotes
“Whitespace is like air: it is necessary for design to breathe.” – Wojciech Zieliński
“A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” – Alec Issigonis
“Pay attention to what users do, not what they say” – Jakob Nielsen
“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” – Shigeru Miyamoto
“A Design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.” – Brenda Laurel
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.” – Buckminster Fuller
“A healthy team is made up of people who have the attitude that it is better to learn something new than to be right.” – Bill Buxton
“A typeface is an alphabet in a straightjacket.” – Alan Fletcher
“A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.” – Henri Matisse
“Accessible design is good design.” – Steve Ballmer
“An idea can turn to dust or magic depending on the talent that rubs against it.” – Bill Bernbach
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.” – E. F. Schumacher
“As the saying goes, type is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters.” – Matthew Carter
“As we decrease uncertainty, we give ourselves permission to increase fidelity.” – Jonathan Irwin
“Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.” – Judy Garland
“By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.” – Robert Bringhurst
“Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create something new you must have doubt.” – Milton Glaser
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” – William S. Burroughs
“Design thinkers look past a project to the next project, to the next step in the strategy. They look sideways to the tangents that are affected by the result, and longer term to the investment required as a result of solving the problem currently in front of the team. No problem is solved in isolation-either from the past, or from the future.” – Mark Dziersk
“Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.” – Brian Reed
“I’m convinced that without bad design, the world would be a far less stimulating place; we would have nothing to marvel over and nothing to be nostalgic about.” – Carrie Phillips
“In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.” – Robert Bringhurst
“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.” – Charles Eames
“The function of design is letting design function.” – Micha Commeren
“The details are not the details. They make the design.” – Charles Eames
“The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, empathize, synthesize, and glean insights that enable him or her to ‘make the invisible visible.’” – Hillman Curtis
“There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.” – Massimo Vignelli
“There’s the whole Buddhist thing about the essence of a bowl being its emptiness—that’s why it’s useful. Its emptiness allows it to hold something. I guess that means that design must talk about something else. If you make design about design, you’re just stacking bowls, and that’s not what bowls are for.” – Frank Chimero
Creative Design Quotes
“Creativity is to discover a question that has never been asked. If one brings up an idiosyncratic question, the answer he gives will necessarily be unique as well.” – Kenya Hara
“Creativity is only as obscure as your reference.” – Aaron Wiggan
“Creativity is nothing but the way to solve new problems.”
“Creativity is nothing but a mind set free.” – Torrie T. Asai
“Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing; to others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.” – Lou Dorfsman
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams
“Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.” – Ray Kroc
“Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.” – Nicholas Negroponte
“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” – Dr. Edwin Land
“Curiosity about life in all its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” – Leo Burnett
“The key to great ideas is not having them, it is executing them. And great ideas come from problems. As designers we call problems, briefs and we call reactions to problems, concepts.” – Kate Moross
“Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. It must be spread everywhere — on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers’ homes.” – Vladimir Mayakovsky
“Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.” – John Cage
“Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.” – Piet Hein
“Art is long, and time is fleeting.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Art is anything you can get away with.” – Marshal McLuhan
“Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.” – Jay-Z
“Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.” – Ralph Caplan
“Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems.” – Tim Brown
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” – Maya Angelou
Good Design Quotes
“Great design is a multi-layered relationship between human life and its environment.” – Naoto Fukasawa
“Good designers must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times. They should–and must–question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes. For the reality in which they live, for their dreams, their desires, their worries, their needs, their living habits. They must also be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology.” – Dieter Rams
“Good design’s not about what medium you’re working in. It’s about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.” – Susan Kare
“Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.” – Joe Sparano
“Good design is like a refrigerator—when it works, no one notices, but when it doesn’t, it sure stinks.” – Irene Au
“Good design is honest.” – Dieter Rams
“Good design is good business.” – Thomas Watson Jr.
“Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea wasn’t theirs.” – Frank Chimero
“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.” – Ralf Speth
“The alternative to good design is always bad design. There is no such thing as no design.” – Adam Judge
“Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.” – Massimo Vignelli
“The role of the designer is that of a good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests.” – Charles Eames
“There are three responses to a piece of design—‘yes,’ ‘no,’ and ‘Wow.’ ‘Wow’ is the one to aim for.” – Milton Glaser
“To be a good artist / letterer / designer / guitar player, it takes practice. A lot of it. More than you can even fathom when you’re starting out.” – Jessica Hische
Interior Design Quotes
“Real comfort, visual and physical, is vital to every room.” – Mark Hampton
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams
“Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.” – Chris Bangle
“I always put in one controversial item. It makes people talk.” – Dorothy Draper
“Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.” – Ralph Caplan
“Designers are meant to be loved, not to be understood.” – Margaret Oscar
“Luxury is when it seems flawless, when you reach the right balance between all elements. Understated theatricality – that is what my luxury is all about.” – Jean-Louis Deniot
“Rawness and refinement are not opposite ends of a luxurious spectrum. They are two complementary features with which to populate a luxe environment.” – Kelly Weartsler
“If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” – William Morris
“Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.” – Brian Reed
“The details are not the details. They make the design.” – Charles Eames
“Design is so simple. That’s why it’s so complicated.” – Paul Rand
Graphic Design Quotes
“You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt… or in front of a piece of graphic design.” – Stefan Sagmeister
“Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy’s habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place or product.” – Ellen Lupton
“Love blinds us. Don’t love anything — an idea, a tool, a graphic, a technique, a technology, a client, or a colleague — too much.” – Adam Judge
“Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does.” – David Carson
“Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries.” – Neville Brody
Fashion Design Quotes
“Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.” – Jean Cocteau
“Buy less, choose well and do it yourself!” – Vivienne Westwood
“Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them.” – Marc Jacobs
“Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world.” – Marilyn Monroe
“The most important thing to remember is that you can wear all the greatest clothes and all the greatest shoes, but you’ve got to have a good spirit on the inside. That’s what’s really going to make you look like you’re ready to rock the world.” – Alicia Keys
“It’s a new era in fashion – there are no rules. It’s all about the individual and personal style, wearing high-end, low-end, classic labels, and up-and-coming designers all together.” – Alexander McQueen
“Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.” – Rachel Zoe
“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” – Virginia Woolf
“Girls do not dress for boys. They dress for themselves and, of course, each other. If girls dressed for boys they’d just walk around naked at all times.” – Betsey Johnson
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” – Orson Welles
“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.” – Coco Chanel
“Don’t be into trends. Don’t make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way you live.” – Gianni Versace
“My look is attainable. Women can look like Audrey Hepburn by flipping out their hair, buying the large sunglasses, and the little sleeveless dresses.” – Audrey Hepburn
“I wear my sort of clothes to save me the trouble of deciding which clothes to wear.“” – Katharine Hepburn
“The only real elegance is in the mind; if you’ve got that, the rest really comes from it.” – Diana Vreeland
“Fashion is what you’re offered four times a year by designers. And style is what you choose.” – Lauren Hutton
“Create your own style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.” – Anna Wintour
“I don’t consider my own clothing to be outrageous… The truth is that people just don’t have the same references that I do. To me it’s very beautiful and it’s art, and to them it’s outrageous and crazy.” – Lady Gaga
“I like my money right where I can see it…hanging in my closet.” – Carrie Bradshaw
“What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.” – Miuccia Prada
“I have always believed that fashion was not only to make women more beautiful, but also to reassure them, give them confidence.”
“One is never over-dressed or underdressed with a Little Black Dress.” – Karl Lagerfeld
“The fashionable woman wears clothes. The clothes don’t wear her.” – Mary Quant
“People tell me that I’ve saved their marriages. It costs them a fortune in shoes, but it’s cheaper than a divorce. So I’m still useful, you see.” – Manolo Blahnik
“I make a lot of money and I’m worth every cent.” – Naomi Campbell
Web Design Quotes
“This is what happens when we design for everyone — we ‘dumb things down’ to the point that they become useless or inefficient for most people. How does this happen? Well, because although everyone in the world might want to use your product or your website, they’ll want to use it in a very particular way. In order to design your product well for them, you need to understand how they’ll use it and design to support that behaviour.” – Leisa Reichelt
“Far too often, we treat web development as a sprint rather than a marathon. It is the experience designer’s job, in part, to help everyone walk the steps of the experience they’ll create before they run — especially when they’ll be doing so in tandem.” – Andrew Maier
“Experiences we have come to expect on mobile apps have created new standards and expectations for all digital media including the web. The result is websites are evolving to become more app-like in their rich functionality.” – Raj Aggarwal
“Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users are generally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues.” – Steve Krug
“A bad website is like a grumpy salesperson.” – Jakob Neilsen
“If you have no intuitive sense of design, then call yourself an ‘information architect’ and only use Helvetica.” – David Carson
Product Design Quotes
“Y’all talk about UX like it’s just another feature. For a user, it literally is the product. Full stop. Everything else is inside baseball.” – Startup L. Jackson Twitter account
“The conception of ‘artistic work’ presupposes a distinction between useful and useless work and as there are only a few artists, buyers can be found even for their useless products. The artist’s work lies beyond the boundaries of the useful and the useless.” – El Lissitzky
“Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.” – Paul Rand
“Paradoxically, when we advocate for the user within our product or service development teams, we are, in effect, simultaneously advocating for the team to our users.” – Michael Cummings
“Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.” – David Ogilvy
“It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and, yes, beauty to people’s lives.” – Don Norman
“A startup founder who ‘gets’ user experience and design will likely create a more successful product than one who does not. It’s not just because a great user experience makes a product more enjoyable and ultimately fun to use. It’s because this type of design thinking and understanding of the customer seeps into every other aspect of the product.” – Jeff Gothelf
“A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.” – Bill Bernbach
“A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.” – Martin LeBlanc, Iconfinder
“Usability testing should not be a stage gate in your design and development process. It should be a tool with which to gather helpful, diagnostic information from your target users. It’s a means of understanding the goodness of a design’s fit to the intended users’ problems.” – Paul J. Sherman
Logo Design Quotes
“Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.” – Paul Rand
“A logo is less important than the product it signifies; it means it is more important than what it looks like.” – Paul Rand
“We are all born with genius. It’s like our fairy godmother. But what happens in life is that we stop listening to our inner voices, and we no longer have access to this extraordinary ability to create poetry.” – Milton Glaser
“Logos survive because they can adapt to countless formats.” – Sagi Haviv
“A logo is not a brand—it’s only a symbol for a brand. A brand is much more than a logo.” – Marty Neumeier
“At the study, we always try to ignore trends.” – Sagi Haviv
“Great design doesn’t date.” – Harry Seidler
“Designers actually can change the world for the better by making the complicated simple and finding beauty in truth.” – Michael Bierut
“It is only by association with a product, a service, a business, or a corporation that a logo takes on any real meaning. It derives its meaning and usefulness from the quality of that which it symbolizes.”
“The strongest logos tell simple stories.” – Sol Sender
“Don’t try to be original. Try to be good.” – Paul Rand
“There are three responses to a piece of design—yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.” – Milton Glaser
“Logos are the graphic extension of the internal realities of a company.” – Saul Bass
“More rationale decreases subjectivity.” – Sol Sender
“A logo doesn’t sell (directly), it identifies.” – Paul Rand
“A logo is a period at the end of a sentence, not the sentence itself.” – Sagi Haviv
“The best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.” – Marty Neumeier
“Design is thinking made visual.” – Saul Bass
Design Quotes About Simplicity
“Truly elegant design incorporates top-notch functionality into a simple, uncluttered form.” – David Lewis
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.” – Paul Rand
“Simplicity, wit, and good typography.” – Michael Bierut
“Simplicity, carried to an extreme, becomes elegance.” – Jon Franklin
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.” – John Maeda
“Make it simple, but significant.” – Don Draper
“In a very real way, designers create the human environment; they make the things we use, the places we live and work, our modes of communication and mobility. Simply put, design matters. And at a moment in our history in which the scientific community has issued serious warnings about the negative impacts of our flawed designs-from global warming and water pollution to the loss of biodiversity and natural resources-designers have a critical role to play in the creation of a more just, healthful and sustainable world.” – William McDonough
“I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those two things.” – Lindon Leader
“For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H. L. Mencken
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein
See also: 250 Best Quotes On Simplicity
Design Quotes About Color
“Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.” – Paul Gauguin
“I gave to pink, the nerve of the red, a neon pink, an unreal pink.” – Elsa Schiaperelli
“Color helps to express light—not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist’s brain.” – Henri Matisse
“Remember, green’s your color. You are spring.” – Gwendolyn Brooks
“You think it’s one color but it’s not. Closer and closer the folds appear not a deeper blue grey but a heavier one and finally just inches above the trees it’s a small bright seam full of smoke, not really bright but allowing the day as much as it needs.” – Eileen Myles
“Color Vision Deficiency isn’t the end of the world. It’s just a different view of it.” – Karen Rae Levine
“During the blue nights you think the end of the day will never come… Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.” – Joan Didion
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is the love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.” – Maggie Nelson
“Rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tint-forgotten, mysterious, and fresh-of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory.” – Marcel Proust
“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.” – Wassily Kandinsky
“I’ll try out the pencils sharpened to the point of infinity which always sees ahead: [Green]—good warm light. Magenta—Aztec. Old TLIAPALI blood of prickly pear, the brightest and oldest. [Brown]—color of mole, of leaves becoming earth. [Yellow]—madness sickness fear part of the sun and of happiness. [Blue]—electricity and purity love. [Black]—nothing is back. Really nothing. [Olive]—leaves, sadness, science, the whole of Germany is this color. [Yellow]—more madness and mystery all the ghosts wear clothes of this color, or at least their underclothes. [Dark blue]—color of bad advertisements and of good business. [Blue]—distance. Tenderness can also be this blue. [Red]—blood? Well, who knows!” – Frida Khalo
“Each color lives by its mysterious life.” – Wassily Kandinsky
“Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.” – Maya Angelou
“The best color in the whole world is the one that looks good on you.” – Coco Chanel
“There’s a reason we don’t see the world in black and white.” – Celerie Kemble
“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
“With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.” – Henri Matisse
“Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully… To express the love of two lovers by the marriage of two complementary colors… To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a dark background. To express hope by some star. Someone’s passion by the radiance of the setting sun.” – Vincent van Gogh
“If one could only catch that true color of nature—the very thought of it drives me mad.” – Andrew Wyeth
“He says what color are you making the sky and I say something bright enough to make people wish they were here and he squints towards the dancing shrapnel of dying light along a rooftop and he says I love things only as they are.” – Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
“Nature rarer uses yellow than any other hue. Saves she all of that for sunsets prodigal of blue spending scarlet, like a woman yellow she affords only scantly and selectly like a lover’s words.” – Emily Dickinson
“We live in a rainbow of chaos.” – Paul Cézanne
“Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color.” – Matthew Butterick
“There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words—but shades, penumbras.” – Ocean Vuong
“The next time you see a 16-color, blind-embossed, gold-stamped, die-cut, elaborately folded and bound job, printed on handmade paper, see if it isn’t a mediocre idea trying to pass for something else.” – Milton Glaser
“He squints towards the dancing shrapnel of dying/ light along a rooftop and he says I love things only as they are/ and I’m sure I once did too but I can’t prove it to anyone these days and he says the end isn’t always about what dies and I know I know/ or I knew once and now I write about beautiful things/ like I will never touch a beautiful thing again and the man/ looks me in the yes and he points to the blue-orange vault/ over heaven’s gates and he says the face of everyone you miss/ is up there and I know I know I can’t see them but I know.” – Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
“If we were to imagine an orange on the blue side or violet on the yellow side, it would give us the same impression as a north wind coming from southwest.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Depression is on the unknown modes of being. There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity. All language can register is the slow return to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape and habit blurs perception and language takes up its routine flourishes.” – Anne Carson
“Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink.” – Roxane Gay
“You can never judge a paint hue by the liquid color in the paint pot. You must apply it to the wall, wait for the paint to dry, then decide.” – Dorothy Draper
“I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted… the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked.” – Edvard Munch
“I am a believer that color affects people’s moods.” – Lilly Pulitzer