I wouldn’t characterize designers as being different from everybody else in the universe. I think, to some degree, everybody suffers from similar issues. I think everybody should be more generous and more concerned about the effect they have on the world. Being a designer is also about being a good citizen. What does it mean to be a good citizen? It means caring about what’s going on and taking a role. Designers have the unique opportunity to have a different role than an average person who doesn’t have access to production and manufacturing in the same physical way as a designer does. So there is more opportunity and more responsibility. The reality of being in the world and caring about that world is ultimately in our own self-interest. When you create a competitive and acrimonious environment, you suffer. If you play that game, then you have to pay the consequences on a personal level. Milton Glaser.

I am also a very persistent man: a stubborn, persistent man. And the reward is still the same reward: doing things that have quality, that are still powerful, and that reach people. And, of course, the sheer joy of doing it. I love coming in to my office and working. Milton Glaser.

I had a good friend who was a very good designer and was very indebted to the ideas of money, success, and the rewards of accomplishment. And then, like everybody, he began to fade, and he was so bitter about the fact that the world was no longer coming to him for what he had done all his life. And he became uninterested in working any more. He lost all his appetite for doing things. And I realized that the focus of his life was about the consequences of his work rather than the work itself. And I think that is a kind of sadness. Because it leaves you with nothing. Because eventually—particularly in an industry that deals so much with fashion—you are going to be out of favor some day. Milton Glaser.

For one thing—and here you can use memory—you can look at the work you’ve done in the past and gauge its effectiveness, its power, and its grace. But you have to be tough-minded. You must be able to self-evaluate. You have to be very tough about your work in order to get anywhere. Like everything else, the issue surrounds narcissism and self-protection. You just have to be able to look and be able to assess what is not very good or not as good as you hoped. What I also find interesting is that as you progress in this field—as opposed to most other fields—there are some things you can’t do anymore. I can’t do the things I was able to do 30 years ago. Milton Glaser.

I often say that the most important thing in those first ten years out of school is not to take a job that will determine your entire life—which happens to a lot of people. They start working for a magazine and they start by assisting, and then they become a junior art director, and then an art director, and ten years later, they’re married and have children. And then the option to change course has been reduced to almost nothing. So you have to be careful. One of the great things at Push Pin was that we did not earn a lot of money, and it did not improve our living conditions. Once your living condition is improved, it’s very hard to move back from it. Milton Glaser.

… I remember for my first job at CBS Records, I hired Milton Glaser to do an illustration for a Carole King ad. As I was dialing his phone number, I was shaking in my boots. It was like calling the pope. I remember I rang him up, and I asked him to do an illustration for a full-page ad for Carole King. He sent me an illustration that was—well, let’s say it wasn’t his best. I knew it. Even at that age, I knew it, even though I thought of him as God’s gift to the uni- verse. So I called his rep and told him we were hoping he’d give us something different.

Milton absolutely refused. He just said, «Sorry, what you see is what you get.» And I went home and cried and didn’t sleep for a week because I thought I had offended Milton Glaser. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized that he had done the right thing by standing up for what he thought was right. If you don’t, people will take everything you have. You may risk losing a job, but in the grand scheme of things, I believe that by standing up for yourself, you’re doing the graphic design business a service. I used to get angry with friends of mine who were also doing book-jacket design as freelancers. They wouldn’t charge for messenger bills and they wouldn’t charge for mechanicals, and I’d say, «You know, you’re fucking it up for the rest of us.» And they’d say, «I’m afraid I won’t get called again.» And it just drove me crazy. I’m a big believer in the bungee jump. I think you have to do the right thing and the fair thing even if you’re afraid.

Carin Goldberg.

When I get a request to come up with something brand-new, it’s really hard for me. Really hard. I end up having to invent a problem in order to do it. And that is something I just love doing. It gives me great physical pleasure to solve problems. I remember watching Massimo Vignelli do things over and over again. But each time, they were always slightly different. He found enormous pleasure in finding slightly different ways of doing the thing that he loved to do. Michael Beirut.

You need some imagination and knowledge. I think of artists as creative because they have to invent something out of nothing. I think designers design because they can’t invent something out of nothing. Or at least that’s why I design. Michael Beirut.

Design is one of the few disciplines that is a science as well as an art. Effective, meaningful design requires intellectual, rational rigor along with the ability to elicit emotions and beliefs. Thus, designers must balance both the logic and lyricism of humanity every time they design something, a task that requires a singularly mysterious skill. Debbie Millman.

Design invests raw matter with what Bruce Mau calls «performativity»—it endows an inert material with a capacity to incite action. But in order to accomplish this most effectively, designers must conjure this power. This process is complicated. The fundamental backbone of any good design solution is measured not only by what moti- vates an audience to think in a particular way, but what inspires them to feel a response. Debbie Millman.