I just loved messing around online. I had an account on the school UNIX system, MichNet, in ’89. I played with MUD and FTP. There were a lot of people swapping software, and I loved collecting fonts. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but I guess it’s fine because that’s how you can get into things when you don’t have the financial means. You can call it pirating or you can call it learning to be a customer later. Jeff Veen.

The problem right now is that radical design is just a fashionable space. There’s nothing really radical out there. Radical, for instance, would be non-commercial. Neville Brody.

My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That’s our job. We take news or information or emotions like «hope» or «turn left» or «buy this» or «be sexy»—as well as notions of brand image as broad concepts—and we give that tangible form. We make it real for people. Neville Brody.

The ideas behind my work are quite political—with a small p—and the message I convey is all about awareness. It’s all about the fact that, these days, graphic design is part of a heavily manipulative industry. Neville Brody.

Other times I would just do occasional things here and there, … but I was always incorporating these kinds of thoughts to try and steer and direct the client toward success. My dedication was always toward the project, not to the client specifically, because sometimes the client didn’t really know what they were doing. Art Chantry.

I thought I might be able to teach myself how to write. I started sitting down every day at the computer. I would get on Facebook, which was something I had just discovered—I didn’t really understand it very well—and I would find something around my studio, scan it, and then write about why I thought it was cool, what was interesting about it.

Basically, I wanted to learn how to do that in an interesting way that people would find amusing. Over the next two-and-a-half years and several thousand essays later, I was approached by a publisher who said, «Let’s do a book out of these.» That’s essentially what the book is.

I have learned how to design a voice that I can use to speak with and tell this information in a fun and anecdotal way that people have responded to. The result is this book.

Art Chantry.

One of the first places we played live for a lot of people was in Orlando, in 1994. We were just amazed that someone knew who we were and got in touch and paid for a plane ticket to America to play. And then we turn up, and it's a massive, full-on rave. We had this track, «Chemical Beats,» and we'd show up with an MPC and a Juno-106 and some distortion pedals and just make it up.

No one was asking us to come and play that kind of thing in England then. We'd turn up in the States and play records like «Song to the Siren» and people would know them. It was mind-blowing, really. We'd made this record in our bedroom, and suddenly we were in America, which for us was an exotic place to go—even though, I must admit, Orlando is maybe not the most exotic place in the world. But for us, at that time, we couldn't believe it! And then we'd go off to San Francisco and New York.

Tom Rowlands.

… data is a new creative material. For designers, it should be considered and incorporated in the same way that text and image have been for centuries. We’ve seen how data is transforming commerce, but I am fascinated by its applications in the arts. I’ve enjoyed seeing the ways that others are integrating it into art forms like fashion, music, and sculpture. Nicholas Felton.

I find developing color palettes really difficult. Much of the time I will simply ignore color until near the end of a project. Picking a palette up front can be useful and help move things forward quickly, but I may also tire of the initial combination if I work on it for too long. So it can be helpful to postpone that effort until the end. Nicholas Felton.

Over the last year, we’ve started explaining design as «the rendering of intent.» The designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.

We’ve found this definition seems to resonate with people more than any other. People can see the relationship between the intended outcome and the process that renders it.

Experiences are the journeys that people take before, during, and after coming into contact with our design. We can choose our intentions for what we want our users’ journeys to be. And when we render those intentions, we’re designing for our users’ experiences. Experience design is rendering intentions of the user’s journey.

We need to look at our design process as a way to come to a single intention as much as it is to make that intention real in the world. And it’s with the lens of this new definition that we can see we still have much work to do before every design will be a great one.

Jared M. Spool.