Good Design is Suggestive

There are two kinds of symmetry, repetition and recursion. Recursion means repetition in subelements, like the pattern of veins in a leaf.

Symmetry is unfashionable in some fields now, in reaction to excesses in the past.

Architects started consciously making buildings asymmetric in V...

The ambitious are not content to imitate. This growth of taste is a conscious attempt at originality.

The greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone...

Few would deny that a story should be like life. Working from life is a valuable tool in painting too, though its role has often been misunderstood. The aim is not simply to make a record. The point of painting from life is that it gives your mind something to chew on: when your eyes are looking ...

It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there's more where that came from. When people first start drawing, for example, they're often reluctant to redo parts that aren't right; they feel they've been lucky to get that far, and if they try to redo something,...

Hard problems call for great efforts. In math, difficult proofs require ingenious solutions, and those tend to be interesting. Ditto in engineering.

When you have to climb a mountain you toss everything unnecessary out of your pack. And so an architect who has to build on a difficult site, ...

Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion. The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual medium, because they demand near perfection. In math terms, they are a clos...

A lot of bad design is industrious, but misguided.

Problems can be improved as well as solutions. In software, an intractable problem can usually be replaced by an equivalent one that's easy to solve. Physics progressed faster as the problem became predicting observable behaviour, instead o...

Aiming at timelessness is a way to make yourself find the best answer: if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself. Some of the greatest masters did this so well that they left little room for those who came after.

Strangely enough, if you want to make something tha...

At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise.

Today's experimental error is tomorrow's new theory. If you want to discover great new things, then instead of turn...

Humour is related to strength. To have a sense of humour is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humour is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humour is to be wounded by them. And so the mark-- or at least the prerogative-- of strength is not to take oneself too seriously. The co...

In art, the highest place has traditionally been given to paintings of people. There is something to this tradition, and not just because pictures of faces get to press buttons in our brains that other pictures don't. We are so good at looking at faces that we force anyone who draws them to work ...

In math, simplicity means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a p...

An original design is often personal and strange.

The only style worth having is the one you can't help. And this is especially true for strangeness. There is no shortcut to it. The Northwest Passage that the Mannerists, the Romantics, and two generations of American high school students ha...

Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems.

Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born near Milan instead of Florence. Today we move around more, but great w...