Ellen Lupton Design Quotations

Think more design less

Design is art that people use,

It is easier to talk than to listen. Pay attention to your clients, your users, your readers, and your friends. Your design will get better as you listen to other people.

Design is an art of situations. Designers respond to a need, a problem, a circumstance, that arises in the world. The best work is produced in relation to interesting situations - an open-minded client, a good cause, or great content.

Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.

Working within the constraints of a problem is part of the fun and challenge of design.

Graphic design is the spit and polish but not the shoe.

Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier.

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.