Glimmer contains hundred of great lines and quotes. Here are 30 of 'em.

“Design is the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes.” —Bruce Mau

The process designers follow—which blends art and science, and is fueled by human empathy—is arduous and at times heartbreaking. It is invariably filled with missteps, though each one tends to bring the designer a step closer to getting it right. And when that happens, the result can transform some aspect of the way we live. Suddenly, the act of listening to music, or peeling a potato, or accessing potable water, is different, improved. In this way, progress happens by design.

The “glimmer moment” is the point when a life-changing idea crystallizes in the mind.

“A designer does not have the luxury of cynicism.” —Bruce Mau

“Designers are often in the role of “anti-experts”—they tend to come at challenges from the perspective of the outsider. “When I’m totally unqualified for a job, that’s when I do my best work.” —Paula Scher, Pentagram

“Naïve is what allows you to try to do what the experts say can’t be done.”—Bruce Mau

“Designers live in an expansive world where they believe the only thing limiting us is the stuff we haven’t figured out yet.”—Roger Martin, Rotman School

"Not everything is about design, but design is about everything." —Michael Bierut, Pentagram

“Right now, the capabilities are out there to do just about anything we want to do. We used to ask ourselves, ‘What can we do?’ But now the real question is, ‘What should we do?’ ”—Designer/inventor Dean Kamen

“Think laterally. It can be helpful to think about an idea from a point of view that makes no sense whatsoever.” —Stefan Sagmeister, designer

It’s all about smart recombinations: The best designers seem to have a natural eye for spotting patterns and discerning possible relationships between things that most of us view as being separate and unrelated.

“Everybody has ideas about how to fix things and change the world. The difference with designers is that they have the ability to give form to those ideas.”—Clement Mok, designer and former Apple creative director


In troubled regions of the world, the role of designers is critical in part because they give form to possible solutions. “And the reality is, people don’t fund problems, they fund solutions.” —Cameron Sinclair, Architecture for Humanity

"Through the act of making things, we find that we learn about ideas.” —Tim Brown, IDEO

“When you’re looking to do something truly different, you’re out there on a limb. You can feel the branch moving under you in the wind. Sometimes you hear the sound of a saw. But you have to try to bring others out there on that limb with you. You have to say, ‘Come, look what I see—look at the view from here!’ ”—Bruce Mau

If design is the new advertising, this can be seen as good news for innovative companies. It means they can design their way into the public consciousness, even though they may lack big ad budgets. "Advertising is a promise, but design is performance." — Brian Collins

“The mind loves puzzles. As a species, we’re programmed to solve them. So if you create a small difficulty, the inert mind is moved and guided to action.”—Milton Glaser

“What I’m hearing from top Fortune 500 executives is that they know how to make just about anything—but they don’t know what to make.”—Patrick Whitney, design and business strategy guru



The companies that are unable to figure out how to design and deliver a great experience have little else to do but make pleas for our attention, that are mostly ignored—in other words, they advertise. “In this new environment, you could think of traditional advertising as a tax on laggards.”—Brian Collins

 “You notice there’s a problem. You think, ‘Surely, someone must have invented something that does this little job—I’ll go find it.’ Then you discover it doesn’t exist. And then you start thinking, ‘Well, how hard can it be to make one?’ I have since learned that this is how things get started.” —Jock Brandis, designer of The Universal Nutsheller

“When things aren’t working the way they should be, you have the makings of a great design project.”
—Bruce Mau

“Every piece of design must have a combination of something that’s familiar and something that’s surprising. The familiar gets us in the door, and the surprising keeps us engaged.” —Brian Collins

“Constraints make you more creative, or at least that’s how it works for me. If you’ve got all kinds of options available to you, then how do you know what to do or where to begin? But if all I’ve got to work with is some wood and cement and maybe a bicycle wheel, I’m ready to go.” —Jock Brandis



“Design is no longer about one designer in one place trying to come up with one solution. Problems are taken up everywhere, solutions are developed and tested and contributed to the global commons, and those ideas are tested against other solutions.”—Bruce Mau

“It’s not a question of should we design the way we live. We have to start to think about our lives that way. It’s imperative.” —Brian Collins

“When you think about it, design is a philosophical statement. It’s a way for you to say to the world: ‘This is who I am. This is what’s important in my life, what I value, what I believe.’”—Bruce Mau

What some of the latest research findings show is that people do actually retain the ability to keep learning, though they absorb and process information a bit differently. Here’s the interesting part: The older you get, the more you begin to think like a designer.

“If we are able to design our lives wouldn’t the best result—the best measure of success ultimately—be that every day is interesting?” —Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED conferences

How do you design your life to encourage constant learning? The answer, Mau suggests, is to intentionally and constantly “keep moving away from what you know.”

“You have to begin designing without all the information that you’ll eventually need. The goal is to be an expert coming out, not going in.”—Bruce Mau