Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. John Maeda.

There is no such thing as a boring project. There are only boring executions. Irene Etzkorn.

Design everything on the assumption that people are not heartless or stupid but marvelously capable, given the chance. John Chris Jones.

Creativity is to discover a question that has never been asked. If one brings up an idiosyncratic question, the answer he gives will necessarily be unique as well. Kenya Hara.

Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem. John Maeda.

Everything is designed. Few things are designed well. Brian Reed.

We run up against a lot of speculative design in pitches. There are plenty of reasons why we don’t prepare any, not least is the fact an RFP won’t tell you everything you need to know to solve the problem in a way that would hold up to any real scrutiny. There’s an Aesop’s fable about a peacock that’s nearly made king, but he’s exposed as a showy fraud by an inquisitive magpie. Spec work has a power that’s hard to argue, but in a pitch good questions beat good answers. We’d rather be the magpie than the peacock. Michael Johnson.

For our pitches, we have a «make ‘em sick, make ‘em well» philosophy. This is something Hannah Paramore, our president, has preached to us; it’s an old adage from one of her mentors and we’ve found it to be highly effective.

First, you make ’em sick: We tell our clients the issues they’re having with their brands and their websites. Often times, there’s too much going on: visual clutter and unclear calls to action are the most common issues websites more than three or four years old face. Then we cure them with our creative. It’s always a striking difference; our creative tends to be much more minimalistic than what they expect.

Matt Burch.

I’ve always admired designers (graphic, type, etc.) whose work can’t be stylistically pinned down. I probably have subconsciously tried to follow the style of not having a style, but I don’t know if I’ve been successful or not. I have lots of self-doubt. Tal Leming.

Seriously, if I don’t have an answer to ‹Why does this typeface need to exist?› I won’t start drawing. I never want to make things just for the sake of making them. Tal Leming.