30 Graphic Design Quotes to Inspire You and Boost Creativity

Browse our graphic design quotes from experts in various industries and get inspired. Whether you’re stuck or looking for new ideas, find the creative boost you need.

Graphic design is visual communication that provides information and shows an audience new perspectives. To do this successfully, designers have to constantly evolve and explore new avenues of their imagination and creativity. 

Looking at quotes from successful designers about the craft can help with developing new skills. We cover the areas of product, branding, website, environmental, and animation design to give you that nudge in the right direction with expert advice and practical tips

It’s all about one thing: creative problem-solving to get the story out.

– Bob Greenberg

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Before you even get started designing your product, make sure you understand the story behind why your customers need it. Ideally, your product and its design solve a problem, and to find out the issues customers are facing you have to get to know them.

Research into pain points can be particularly helpful for creating problem-solving design while a general overview in the form of customer personas provides you with the whole story. Use information such as demographics or likes and dislikes to also guide your design decisions.

Only when the design fails does it draw attention to itself; when it succeeds, it’s invisible.

– John D. Berry

Aim to create a user-friendly product design that is inclusive. Your design should make it easy to use and require no special knowledge or technology to access. Work to include everyone regardless of their intellect, mobility, location, or health.

Don’t look at design in isolation but work with other teams to make informed decisions. To achieve your goal of a well-designed product, find the right balance with other components in the development process like research, content, technology, and business strategy.

Design is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, and the nature of the interaction between people and technology. When done well, the results are brilliant, pleasurable products.

- Don Norman

When graphic designing products, look at the interaction between customer and product to find your way into improving usability. For a great user experience, products should be effective, efficient, engaging, error-tolerant, and easy to learn.

Consider these factors during your design process and use them as guidance to test your product. Usability testing can give you invaluable insights into what works and what doesn’t. Take notes and adjust your design accordingly.

Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create - be it product, communication or system - is a result of the process of making inspiration real.

- Maggie Macnab

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Product design requires creativity and an innovative mindset making it a form of art that requires skill, practice, and intuition. The graphic designer’s vision and the design process come together to craft something new and attractive. 

Inspiration is the starting point while the process helps to answer questions about the usefulness of a product. The natural result of this merging of the spark of an idea with the creative process should be a product that solves customer problems.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

- E. F. Schumacher

Always keep the user in mind and try to make your new creation as simple as possible. To avoid complexities, find the main function or problem your product will solve. Ask questions around that and set your design goals around your answers. Prioritize your main function to make decisions that ensure you don’t get lost in details that would only add complexity.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no room for creativity. See it as a constraint that makes you think harder about what you want to achieve and encourages you to consider different ways to solve a problem. In this way, simplicity triggers new ideas.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

- Steve Jobs

Creating a culture of acceptance when things go wrong is a healthy foundation for any product design team. Be open to critique and always see working with feedback as a learning curve that helps you to improve. Accept that mistakes happen and be confident that you’re able to move on and find a better solution.Test and try out multiple graphic design software's that are available in the market, choose what's working best for you. 

Regular design reviews throughout product development can be incredibly helpful to keep errors to a minimum. In the end phase, usability testing is a great way to get new insights. It uncovers flaws that you and your team might not be able to see after working on a project every day.

Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.

- Paul Rand

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Brand identity design tells your customers who you are and ensures that they recognize your business through the visual content you produce. It does so without drawing attention to itself but instead embodies the brand via components like logos, typography, and color palettes.

To do that, you need a clearly defined identity for your business that should be available as brand guidelines. This acts as your foundation and helps you nail down the basics of your design structure and the building blocks you need to guide your design choices and convey the personality of your business.

Brand is the holistic sum of customers’ experiences, composed of visual, tonal and behavioral brand components, many of which are shaped by interaction design.

- Kate Kaplan

Your brand identity consists of many different components that you should work into your designs. All elements combined create a unique experience for customers that is coherent and memorable.

Communicate your brand through consistent color palettes, shapes, fonts, logo design, and imagery. Experiment with colors that go together or contrast or think about the emotions you want to evoke through different fonts. The consistency you get out of using the same components and style for every design is what makes your brand memorable.

Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity.

- Marty Neumeier

Before you start creating branding documents and designs, it’s important to have a plan that can guide you through the creative process. Your brand identity consists of your company values, how you communicate them through your products and services, and the emotions you want to evoke when customers interact with your brand.

Create a strategy to develop the personality of your business based on research on your target audience, your competitors, your value proposition, and your mission and vision. Working on this first will give you a direction to go for and spark creative ideas to increase sales and brand awareness.

If you don’t give the market the story to talk about, they’ll define your brand’s story for you.

 - David Brier

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How your brand is perceived by your target audience can be different from the brand personality you’re trying to convey. You can’t entirely control how customers perceive your brand but you can reinforce your message in the way you communicate and design your products or services.

To create a brand story that resonates with your customers, try connecting your company’s personality with all five of their senses. Next to connecting on the auditory, olfactory, taste, and emotional levels, visuals are usually the first glimpse your audience gets of your brand. This makes design a crucial part of branding.

Define what your brand stands for, its core values and tone of voice, and then communicate consistently in those terms.

- Simon Mainwaring

Ensure you’re always following brand guidelines and represent the core values of your business in all your designs. The goal is to achieve brand consistency with all your efforts to create a recognizable brand across multiple channels.

This way you can build trust and a sense of reliability with your customers. The creative challenge here is to always find new ways to represent your brand within the confines of guidelines and consistency.

The most important thing to remember is you must know your audience.

- Lewis Howes

To foster brand loyalty, stay up to date with who your customers are and what they expect from your brand. Regular research and review of your target audience and their requirements are crucial.

Ensure you’re constantly aware of who you’re designing for and how you can improve your work to get even better results for your customers. This mindset ensures that your brand and products stay visually appealing and user-friendly to outperform the competition.

Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries.

- Neville Brody

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Web design is like a painting in that it’s influenced by current trends and what is known to be attractive or user-friendly at that moment in time. But unlike a painting, the design of a website can be adjusted. In the fast-paced online world, it’s crucial to keep up to date with design trends and redesign when necessary. 

When you’re redesigning make sure you maintain a consistent look and feel across your site. Particularly for larger websites, review brand guidelines and styles to implement the color palette, fonts, and button styles that convey your company’s personality. Try to follow trends to keep your design fresh and engaging but not at the cost of your brand identity.

Intuitive design is how we give the user new superpowers.

- Jared Spool

With its focus on user experience, intuitive design empowers users to navigate and make their journey through your website with ease. Web design should be aesthetically pleasing but also geared to help visitors find information quickly.

You can find out your visitors’ intentions when landing on your site through research. To see if what you designed works for your users, create usability tests in which they have to perform certain tasks and comment on how they solve them. This way, you can see what works and what needs to be adjusted.

Technology over technique produces emotionless design.

- Daniel Mall

Emotional design focuses on creating visuals that provide positive user experiences by tapping into three cognitive levels. Here, graphic designers consider the visceral, behavioral, and reflective levels to conjure positive associations with brands and their products or services.

This type of design hones in on users’ needs and their interactions with your business. It builds on getting the functionality of your website right to help users achieve their goals as effectively and efficiently as possible.

If you think math is hard, try web design.

- Trish Parr

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When you’re designing a website, there are a lot of moving parts you have to keep track of like UX, UI, coding, or database management. There’s likely a whole team working on your website, which adds to the importance of having a plan as everyone needs to be clear on what your goals are.

To get started, list what you want to achieve with your new website or redesign project. Make sure the goals you set are in line with your overall business or marketing strategy. You can use these goals to measure your work as well as the success of your new design once it’s live.

What separates design from art is that design is meant to be... functional.

- Cameron Mol

Good web design is highly functional and provides users with what they want efficiently and quickly. But to get better rankings some businesses push user experience back to second place on the priority list when it should be number one. 

Improve your website’s functionality by looking at competitor websites as well as your own and compare notes about what you like and don’t like. This way, you’ll easily spot areas for improvement and work on them before your users do and start bouncing off your site.

Think more, design less.

- Ellen Lupton

Think about the impact your design has on users throughout the website development process. To check whether your assumptions were right, perform usability testing before launching your website or redesign.

Testing helps your team develop empathy for struggling users instead of developing tunnel vision from working on a project for some time. Identify issues with complex flows, catch minor errors, and extract the data you need to create a better user experience.

We see more corporations yielding to the pressure from consumers’ demand on responsible business and sustainable processes of operations.

- Helene Li

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Today’s consumers expect businesses to show awareness of and take action when it comes to sustainability. It’s crucial to be transparent about production processes and how businesses do their part in protecting the environment.

This transparency fosters brand loyalty, as customers are more likely to buy from a sustainable brand. Make sure you clarify and put up your eco-friendly values in as many places as you can, such as your website, social media, and product packaging.

Quality is always sustainable.

- Thomas Sandell

Sustainable design focuses on reducing the environmental impacts of products or services. The aim is to minimize the consumption of non-renewable resources and waste as well as creating healthy and productive environments.

A high-quality sustainable product is the result when environmental, social, and economic impacts have all been considered and measures to ensure minimal effect from the initial phase through to end of life have been implemented. Consumers now look for this information and expect a more environmentally friendly production. When purchasing a product, they consider this kind of sustainable design.

Sustainable design gives an authentic value to the consumer.

 - Katarina Graffman

Sustainable design shows your customers that you care about the environment. If you clarify how your product is made and they can see that reflected in the product and packaging they hold in their hands, they have physical proof of your authenticity.

This helps to create a more personal connection between your brand and your target audience, as you both share the same values. As long as you deliver according to their expectations, you’ll gain their trust. Customers who are passionate about protecting the environment are also more likely to tell friends and family about your sustainable design and become brand advocates.

Whether it’s beautiful or not, if it doesn’t take care of itself and the people in it, it’s as bad as a sinking ship – which is what most of it is.

- Michael Reynolds

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According to the World Commission on Environment and Development, sustainable architecture meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. When you design for sustainable purposes in architecture, the functionality of buildings is more important than the aesthetics. 

This is an exciting opportunity to create designs that achieve long-term energy and resource efficiency. It requires designers to innovate constantly to achieve sustainability excellence throughout the building lifecycle. The benefits to the environment and the people are what make up an environmental design’s success.

Buy less, choose well, make it last.

- Vivienne Westwood

Think about how you can repurpose your designs or how you can recycle materials. If you make this part of your decision process, you’re on your way to eco-friendly and sustainable design. This awareness of environmental issues helps to create a more resilient economy.

Consider the practice of circular design where products don’t have the usual lifecycle from development to end of life but at least parts of them are made to be repurposed or reused. Aim for this sustainable mindset and your designs will have a truly transformative power that helps the planet.

Waste is a design flaw.

- Kate Krebs

Environmental design requires you to come up with new and interesting ways to use your materials and minimize waste. This principle can also apply to ideas you discarded previously because they weren’t a good fit for a project at the time.

Instead of throwing those ideas out, keep them and see if you can recycle them. To upcycle previous ideas, take a look at your earlier brainstorming sessions and see if you can find a different angle for a new project.

Animation in itself has so many different looks and styles and possibilities.

- Dave Filoni

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Animation designers have a myriad of styles at their disposal that they can pick and choose from for their projects. From 3D to stop motion to whiteboard animation and many more techniques, there are a lot of options businesses can use to represent their brand through animation.

Choose the type of animation that fits best with your brand identity and ideas while still leaving plenty of creative freedom. Make sure you’re aware of industry standards, the key message you want to convey, and the complexity of your topic. Thorough research and a plan help focus your design and prevent any major design flaws.

In my opinion, animation will continue to thrive as long as there are children, parents, television, movies and the need to laugh.

- William Hanna

Animation continues to evolve with new technologies rolling out every year. Animated movies are becoming more and more sophisticated with realistic fantasy environments and creatures that interact with real actors.

In business, animation is most frequently used in advertising to grab the attention of and engage with your target audience. It’s an efficient way to convey complex information quickly and in a way that is easy to understand. Some advertising strategies even use likable animated characters to make it easier to connect with audiences.

A lot of the time in animation is spent getting the story right - that's something you can't rush.

- Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Telling a story with your design is essential to establish communication with your viewers and get your key message across. Visual storytelling encompasses elements of design like composition, contrast, shapes, rhythm, and color. They are used to tap into your audience’s emotions as well as engage them intellectually and aesthetically.

Animation takes this storytelling to the next level when using moving images and sound rather than just a static image. Still, your visuals are at the center of your animation and in combination with good storytelling, viewers should be able to understand what’s happening even without sound.

What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.

- Jeffrey Katzenberg

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Working on an animation project gives you the fantastic opportunity to brainstorm with a team of creatives every day. Jotting down ideas, exploring animation styles, dreaming up new characters or locations, all of this is part of the creative process and often a team effort.

To have a productive brainstorming session, make sure everyone is comfortable with taking risks, throwing their ideas on the table, and is open to what other team members have to say. Towards the end of the meeting leave some time for reflection and discuss what has been generated so far. Ask questions to see where that takes you and discover solutions you can use for your project

Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.

- Steven Spielberg

Let your imagination run wild and explore the endless possibilities that await you in animation. There are backgrounds, character arcs, storylines, and much more to have fun with and take the plunge into new worlds.

It can be easy for the process of coming up with ideas to spiral out of control and take you down a world-building avenue that distracts you from the story here. At this stage, rein in your imagination a little and give yourself some structure by thinking about creating a beginning, middle, and end. To stay focused, make sure you also have a clear idea of what the theme or goal of your new animation idea is.

What's most important in animation is the emotions and the ideas being portrayed. I'm a great believer of energy and emotion.

 - Ralph Bakshi

Portray emotions successfully with your animated designs and you create a connection between your story and your viewers. Feelings evoked by visuals can be enhanced with music and sound to create a fully immersive experience.

Music conveys the passing of time and adds to the sense of moving forward in a story. It helps the illusion of motion on the screen and heightens the empathy viewers feel for the characters. Even if you’ve created outlandish characters and your story is set in bizarre worlds, as long as you tap into people’s emotions, they’ll be sucked in.