John Maeda Design Quotations

Design is about crafting an experience that is unfamiliar enough to feel novel, yet familiar enough to instill confidence.

Videogames are indeed design: They're sophisticated virtual machines that echo the mechanical systems inside cars.

Teaching is the rare profession where the customer isn't always right and needs to be told so appropriately.

Design provides solutions, art asks questions.

Communication in every which way is everything for the leader.

I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn't have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn't have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.

Things that I can do myself, I either do by myself, or teach a willing undergraduate who doesn't know how to do those things by doing it for me. Things that I can't do myself, my graduate students should be doing.

My role is to find strategic insights as to where design can have the most business impact. A designer can bring a viewpoint of not just aesthetics, but economics and usage.

Technology makes possibilities. Design makes solutions. Art makes questions. Leadership makes actions.

In the '70s and '80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science.

Really great products, like @nest, have #design baked in from the beginning instead of slapped on at the end.

Anyone with a computer and a design program can create a page layout. But unless you're trained in design, it won't look very good and it won't communicate very well.

Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form.

Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.