These quotes are about the difficulty of good design. What other quotes on the challenges of doing good design am I missing?

…​it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

— Jonathan Ive

We’ve probably designed 4,000 products at IDEO over my career, and for every one of them I’d like to send a little note with it that says, "I’m sorry that it’s in this present state. Given what I know now, if I could start over again it would be a lot better."

— David Kelley

Design is easy. All you do is stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead.

— Marty Nuemeier - paraphrasing Gene Fowler

Ease of use and ease of learning are not the same.

— Katherine Haramundanis

Computer design is often bad design done on a computer.

— Mike Hicks

Our opportunity, as designers, is to learn how to handle the complexity, rather than shy away from it, and to realize that the big art of design is to make complicated things simple.

— Tim Parsey

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

— Albert Von Szent-Gyorgy

No, Watson, this was not done by accident, but by design.

— Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

About the Author

Paul is a software design and development coach and mentor. He is available for consulting and training through his company, Virtual Genius LLC. He is the author of The EventStorming Handbook and major contributor to Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber. He is also the founder and chair for the Explore DDD conference.