Your Friday Quote
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What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
Your Friday Quote
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The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
Your Friday Quote
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My creative process is a rollercoaster of determination, self-doubt, sweat and procrastination.
Your Friday Quote
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I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Your Friday Quote
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If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page… When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.
Your Friday Quote
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I find going to bed and pulling my imagination over my head often means waking up with a solution to a design problem. That state of limbo, the time between sleeping and waking, seems to allow ideas to somehow outflank the sentinels of common sense.
Your Friday Quote
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Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Your Friday Quote
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We often don’t realize that the people we admire as designers have yet to “arrive.” Their ongoing quests are part of the reason we admire them so much.
Your Friday Quote
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There is nothing glamorous about what I do. I am a working man.
Your Friday Quote
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If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that makes it good or bad.
Your Friday Quote
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If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Your Friday Quote
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Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should say, “Look at this.”
Your Friday Quote
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The best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.
Your Friday Quote
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To be truly useful, any technology has to be unconscious. We don’t pick up a hammer to have a “hammer-and-nail experience.”
Your Friday Quote
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The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire, and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes and even modest talent with those characteristics grows.
Your Friday Quote
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“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
Your Friday Quote
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“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”
Your Friday Quote
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Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.
Your Friday Quote
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If it matches the sofa it’s art. If it demands attention it’s culture.
Your Friday Quote
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In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
J.K. Rowling Commencement Address
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Last week J.K. Rowling gave an inspiring speech at the Harvard Commencement titled “The Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.” The entire address is somewhat lengthy but worth the read. Below are a few paragraphs that stood out to me.
“Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.”
“The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.”
“You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”
Your Friday Quote
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Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash.
Be water, my friend.
Your Friday Quote
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The most meaningful developments in my work are those that occurred involuntarily and blindly, without my knowing what I was going to do, when I had enough faith in my own creative process to be willing to wait for it to happen without my will demanding it.
Your Friday Quote
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It is a lot easier to be new than it is to be good. The criteria for being new is only based on the past few years, but the criteria for being good is based on everything we have learned since the beginning of time.
Your Friday Quote
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When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
Your Friday Quote
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Don’t covet your ideas. Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you.
Your Friday Quote
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It was never my design objective that the furniture be different or novel; only that it be good to sit in, good to use, good to look at, and easy for everyone to buy.