Words

Seek beauty. Choose beauty. Bring beauty into everything you put out in the world. That's not just our job as designers; that’s our responsibility as human beings.

Your brain is like a supercomputer, and your self-talk is a program that runs. So if you tell yourself you're not good at remembering names, you will not remember the name of the next person you meet because you program your supercomputer not to. Keep your self-talk positive and empowering, because your mind is always eavesdropping on your self-talk.

Career planning = career limiting.

The sooner you come to grips with that, the better.

The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

It feels to them as if they do, especially if they're not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.

—Paul Graham

If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations. Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon.

Pull your ideas apart. In order to truly validate your hypothesis, you need to test your framework against others that are different enough to get meaningful user feedback. Sometimes you need to exaggerate those differences in your designs so they’re visible to the untrained eye.

David Ogilvy // "Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict, and disease. They do not die of hard work."

When you have a million people using something, then that’s when creativity really starts to happen on a rapid scale

“Design needs to be plugged into human behavior. Design dissolves in behavior.”  
—Naoto Fukasawa

“It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you are doing.”

“Before you speak ask yourself if what you are going to say is true, is kind, is necessary, is helpful. If the answer is no, maybe what you are about to say should be left unsaid.”
Bernard Meltzer

We generally use the word ‘artist’ to mean visual artist of some sort.

I actually think there’s really very little distinction between an artist of that type and a scientist or engineer of the highest caliber.

And I’ve never had a distinction in my mind between those two types of people.

They’ve just, to me, been people that pursue different paths, but basically kind of headed to the same goal, which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them, so that others can see it, so that others can benefit by it.

Train your eye to spot redundancy. Look around your screen, find elements that are serving a similar purpose. Either pull them apart, group them closer together, or simply merge them into one. That’s how you move closer to simplicity.

Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "**work**" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own.

<n>Nike</n>'s 1977 internal memo, "Principles," attributed to both <n>Rob Strasser</n> and <n>Phil Knight</n>.