I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.
OSCAR WILDE
Digging for Sunrise
At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.
How To Be A Lunatic, The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton
Little Plans
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably in themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hopes and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing intensity. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us.
Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.
Daniel Burnham via ACW
Third Story
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
On Making
Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.
Paul Rand
Black / White / Red
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.
Mark Twain
Pixel as Mother Tongue
The era of transitioning human beings to the screen is over. Now is the time for designers and storytellers to fully embrace the ascendant platforms and invent a vernacular beyond the derivative language of engineers and marketers.
Lightbulb
Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Elementary, My Dear
For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
Sherlock Holmes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Good & True
No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in… I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.
Ernest Hemingway speaking about The Old Man and the Sea | 1951
Bucky Knows
A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
Buckminster Fuller
The Living Brand
A brand is a living entity… the product of a thousand small gestures.
Michael Eisner