Top Android Apps for Architects & Designers

Buildings
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.openbuildings.buildings

Created by architects, “Buildings” gives tourists and architecture enthusiasts a mobile encyclopedia of more than 40,000 buildings across the globe to discover at their fingertips, complete with expert commentary and insight. The app enhances your experience by using GPS to identify your location and highlight interesting ‘Nearby’ buildings.

Architect Design Estimating
http://market.android.com/details?id=air.ArchitectCalc

Easy to use estimating calculator for architects and interior designers. This is an imperial units calculator (feet and inches) for architects. Calculate lengths, areas, hypotenuses, and simple volumes. Add a unit cost to estimate the cost of construction, remodel, or room finishes. Convert easily between imperial units such as square feet and square yards, or feet and inches and miles.

Frame design 2D
http://market.android.com/details?id=dako.dakosoftware.nl

Professional 2D Linear Analysis FEM application at your fingertips. This 2D linear static analysis app allows you to analyze the force distribution, deflections and tensions in 2D structures

Design Dimensions
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.SolidDesignStudio.DesignDimensions

An extensive visual database of commonly referenced items and their corresponding dimensions. With Design Dimensions you will find it remarkably easy to navigate through hundreds of illustrated items to find the exact information you are looking for.

My Measures & Dimensions Lite
http://market.android.com/details?id=si.sis.mymeasureslite

My Measures is a powerful application for storing and sharing object dimensions. A must have tool for all real estate agents, engineers, carpenters, architects, auction sellers, construction workers.

SketchBook Mobile
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.sketchbook

Unleash your creativity with SketchBook Mobile for Android! Autodesk SketchBook® Mobile is a professional-grade paint and drawing application offering a full set of sketching tools and a streamlined and intuitive user interface.

Dwell
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.zumobi.android.dwell

Dwell delivers photos, videos and more for fans of modern architecture & design. With fresh, intelligent coverage of modern architecture and design, tailored for mobile devices, the Dwell App features: Videos and slide-shows showcasing the best in modern home design, Photographs and editorial of product collections, Dynamically updated stories for staying on top of the latest trends while on the go, Facebook and Twitter integration for sharing inspiring design ideas with friends.

Autodesk AutoCAD WS
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.autodesk.autocadws

Experience the freedom of taking your designs with you — wherever you go.
AutoCAD® WS is a mobile CAD application that gives you the freedom and flexibility to view, edit, and share your DWG™ files on your Android phone or tablet. AutoCAD WS mobile app offers a simplified, intuitive set of viewing, editing, and markup tools so you can work on your designs while you are on the go. Open drawings from email attachments, sync your files from the web, or upload drawings directly from AutoCAD software. Drawings can also be saved locally so you can work in the field without an Internet connection.

Adobe Photoshop Express
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.psmobile

Edit and share photos virtually anywhere. Touch to crop, rotate, adjust color, and add artistic effects. Access all your photos and videos directly from your free Photoshop.com account. Quickly share with family and friends. Requires SD card. By downloading you agree to the Terms of Use at http://www.photoshop.com/misc/terms.html

Adobe Collage
http://market.android.com/details?id=air.com.adobe.collage

Adobe® Collage lets you capture and refine concepts by combining inspirational images, drawings, text, and files from select Adobe Creative Suite® components into modern, conceptual moodboards. Upload your files to Adobe Creative Cloud* to refine later or share with others.

Adobe Kuler
http://market.android.com/details?id=air.com.adobe.kuler

Adobe Kuler is the most powerful color inspiration tool you’ve seen on a tablet device. Create harmonious color themes that can inspire any project with easy-to-use tools. Explore hundreds of thousands of color themes created by the Kuler community – a vibrant social network of color enthusiasts.

Smart Ruler Pro
http://market.android.com/details?id=kr.aboy.ruler

Smart Ruler Pro is the easy and useful measuring tools. It has 5 tools for measurement, and includes Protractor pro version. 1. Ruler : for length 2. ProtractorⅠ(Touch) : for angle 3. ProtractorⅡ(Plumb) : for slope 4. ProtractorⅢ(Camera) : goniometer 5. Surface level : clinometer * Pro version added features 1) ProtractorⅢ, Surface level 2) Horizontal x Vertical 3) Multi-Touch mode 4) Caliper mode 5) Architectural and Engineering Scales 6) Thread pitch gauge 7) various Tilt units 8) App2SD

Construction Calculators

This amazing App Features THIRTY ONE (31) Easy-To-Use TIME-SAVING TOOLS for Home Owners. No other construction calculator offers as many features as this one. This simple calculator not only allows you to do all the calculations for your home project, but also allows you to SAVE your calculations. STORE all your notes in the app and also ADD TO CALENDAR any of your notes for remainders. Now features search and full calculator.

More details on Revit 2011

Autodesk will soon release Revit 2011 coming up in a couple weeks. After last years’ release of Revit 2010, I think people are ready for refinement.  For most, it took most of the year to get used to the new ribbon UI — and this year will bring that level of refinement that Revit needs.  Revit should finally become easier to use, more intuitive, and implement a lot of fixes for reported bugs & annoyances.

Out of the list, my favorites are the changes made to the ribbon UI. Many people will be glad to hear that the modify tab can be static now and the contextual tab will have the ability to return to the previous tab when done. Also they’ve included a QAT or Quick Access Toolbar that will give the user an option to “create their own” toolbar. These enhancements will greatly reduce confusion for new users.

Other essentials (read: wish list items) that were included in this release are backgrounds for renderings, a more realistic view for panning around in 3D, text enhancements, tagging items in linked models… a lot of these will help our workflow out immensely!

As I’m sure most of you are here for the details (and not my opinion), alas, here they are:

• Improvements to DWG Export, increased visual fidelity, text treatment
• Improvements 3D display quality & new types of views (ambient occlusion, realistic, consistent colors views)
• View open time reduced
• New Guide Grids (alignment grids) for sheets to help with view alignment
• Align in 3D
• New keyboard shortcut editing dialog box
• New abilities around linked files, ability to tag an object in a linked file
• Quicker file open times, now multi-threaded
• Repeat last command (enter or right-click menu)
• New Autodesk Material Library 2011
• Materials displayed more consistently across views and platforms
• New Placeholder sheets, ability to change placeholder to actual sheet
• Ability to add/crop background image for rendering
• Text enhancements
• Find/Replace
• Options for exporting text to CAD to maintain visual or functional fidelity
• Box around text note
• Distance between leader and text
• Bullets & Numbering now possible
• Additional dialog boxes now resizeable
• Ability to create custom elevation tags
• New sun path feature added
• Ability to control temp dimension appearance (without editing Revit.ini)
• Revit MEP copy/monitor fixtures
• Ability to disable the auto-switch to contextual tab when object is selected so you can keep current tab active.
• Ability to return to previous tab after action completion
• New Properties Palette
• Modify tab is both static & contextual now, remains in same location
• New Customizable QAT (Quick-Access Toolbar) to add your most-used tools
• New workset & design option controls added to the bottom-right of Revit window
• Workset visiblity enhancements

That’s it for now! As always bookmark revit2011.info for the latest on Revit 2011.

Revit 2011 to be released April 8th

Well just like previous years, it looks like early-mid April seems to be the rollout of Autodesk’s new products.  Below is this years rollout schedule for the AEC products, I’ve included them below:

Architecture, Engineering & Construction Products		Release Date
AutoCAD® Architecture 2011		March 25
AutoCAD® MEP 2011		March 25
AutoCAD® Map 3D 2011		March 29
Autodesk® Navisworks® Freedom 2011		April 2
Autodesk® Navisworks® Manage 2011		April 2
Autodesk® Navisworks® Simulate 2011		April 2
AutoCAD® Revit® Architecture Suite 2011		April 8
AutoCAD® Revit® MEP Suite 2011		April 8
AutoCAD® Revit® Structure Suite 2011		April 8
AutoCAD® Structural Detailing 2011		April 8
Autodesk® Revit® Structure 2011		April 8
Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2011		April 8
Autodesk® Robot™ Structural Analysis 2011		April 12
Autodesk® Buzzsaw®		April 17
AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2011		April 20
Autodesk® Ecotect® Analysis		April 20
Autodesk® Constructware®		April 24

New features in Revit Architecture 2011 bring refinement

With today’s press release announcing the 2011 software suite of products, they also updated their 2011 feature list.  Here are some of the new features we’ll see in Revit 2011:

Download the Autodesk Press Packet

Also the brochures for Revit Architecture 2011 & Revit Structure 2011 & Revit MEP 2011:
http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/autodesk_revit_architecture_2011_brochure.pdf
http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/revit_structure_2011_overview_brochure_us.pdf
http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/autodesk_revit_mep_overview_brochure_us.pdf

User Interface Improvements

• A modeless properties palette allows the user to change the properties of an element during placement or modification.
• Contextual tab improvements reduce the number of tab switches and provide consistent tool locations.
• Users now have the ability to adjust the order of tools on the Quick Access toolbar.

User Interface Improvements

Adaptive Components

Adaptive component functionality is designed for situations when components need to flexibly adapt to unique contextual conditions. Adaptive points are created by modifying reference points. The geometry drawn by snapping to these adaptive points results in an adaptive component.

Adaptive Components

Form Editing

A form can be edited in sketch mode by modifying the curves from which it was created. A form can also be dissolved back to the curves from which it was created. Once a form has been dissolved, its profile curves and path (when applicable) remain. These curves and path can be edited to create a new form.

Form Editing

Large Team Workflow

Improve your ability to work with projects containing linked files with the capability to apply view filters, tag elements, and control visibility of worksets.

Large Team Workflow

Text Improvements

Improvements to text tools enable you to:

• Adjust the location of the leader relative to the text block
• Format text with bullets and numbering
• Modify text using the Find & Replace Text tool

Text Improvements

New Structural Tools

Several structural tools, previously available only in Autodesk® Revit® Structure software, are now available to Autodesk Revit Architecture users.

These tools include:

• Curved Beams
• Metal Decking
• Slanted Structural Columns
• Trusses
• Beam Coping tool
• Beam System Tags

New Structural Tools

Enhanced Visualization

Autodesk Revit Architecture now provides the ability to display materials and ambient lighting in editable views.

Enhanced Visualization

Keyboard Shortcuts

Autodesk Revit Architecture now provides a new interface for managing keyboard shortcuts for Revit Tools:

• Add or remove keyboard shortcuts and assign multiple shortcuts for each Revit Tool.
• Import keyboard shortcuts from another user.
• Export keyboard shortcuts to share them with other users, or to a spreadsheet program where you can sort, organize, and print a list of shortcuts for quick reference.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Custom Elevation Tags

Define the appearance of view tags used for elevations. Elevation tags can now have any shape and any number of arrows pointing in nonorthogonal directions relative to the tag body.

Custom Elevation Tags

Background Images in Rendering

Autodesk Revit Architecture now provides the ability to display images in the background of rendered views.

Background Images in Renderings

Sheet Improvements

Improvements to sheets enable you to:

• List sheets on the drawing list that are not in the project, such as consultant drawings
• Consistently align views on sheets

Sheet Improvements

Convert Line Types

The convert lines tool converts existing model lines, detail lines, and symbolic lines into the preferred line type.

Convert Line Types

Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011
Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2011 software helps architects and designers work naturally, design freely and deliver projects efficiently. Purpose-built for Building Information Modeling (BIM), Revit Architecture helps you explore design concepts and forms, and better maintain your design data through documentation and construction. With parametric change technology, any change you make is automatically updated throughout your model, keeping your design and documentation coordinated and more reliable. Share essential BIM data with your partners for a more collaborative, integrated building design process. Support a more efficient design process that enables improved sustainable design analysis, clash detection, construction planning and material fabrication.

What’s New

Key Features Common to all Revit Platform Software Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2011, Autodesk® Revit® MEP 2011 and Autodesk® Revit® Structure 2011 software share a common set of key enhancements for improved design functionality and workflow to help design teams accelerate better design with tools that promote productivity and support sustainable design and analysis. See the Autodesk® Revit® Platform Enhancements for 2011 backgrounder for information on the platform enhancements.

Enhancements specific to Revit Architecture 2011 include:

Form Editing

• Sketch editing for conceptual masses in Revit Architecture 2011 has been improved with the ability to edit individual profiles of any type of form without having to delete the form first, similar to “sketch mode” but even more accessible.
• The Dissolve Form command removes the surfaces from a form, leaving the valuable defining profiles, curves and points.
• In the past, only voids could be used as cutting elements for Boolean operations, and it was difficult to access them again for further transformations. Now solids can be used to cut other solids, so that when the cut is executed, geometry from both forms remains visible.

Surface Rationalization

• The ability to rationalize surfaces has been enhanced. Surfaces can now be split by levels, reference planes and model lines.
• Now, divided surface patterns can be made up of any combination of UV grids and intersects created by these new elements. Adaptive

Components

The adaptive component is a generalized implementation of the pattern-based curtain panel family, which was introduced with the 2010 release of Autodesk Revit Architecture. It is designed to handle cases where components need to flexibly adapt to many unique contextual conditions. The adaptive component can be used to simply fill in the empty edge panels on a divided surface or for more complex modeling or framing applications.

Structural Tools

Several features formerly available only in Autodesk Revit Structure software are now available in Autodesk Revit Architecture, such as the ability to create:

• Curved beams
• Slanted columns
• Beam copings
• Trusses
• Metal deck profiles, and more

Rendering Enhancements:

• Background Images Revit Architecture now provides the ability to display images in the background of rendered views.
• Procedural Textures Create custom procedural textures based on patterns such as checker, gradient, wood or tiles.
• New Autodesk Material Library More smoothly exchange material data between Autodesk applications with the new Autodesk Material Library. Materials can be exchanged with certain other supporting Autodesk applications (AutoCAD®, Autodesk® Inventor®, Autodesk Revit MEP and Autodesk Revit Structure software) in a true one-to-one mapping — helping create a consistent definition and rendered look and minimize the need to rework materials after data import. Note: The new Material Library in Revit Architecture 2011 will only export materials, lights, or environments to 3ds Max/3ds Max Design 2011.
• Removal of Four-Core Rendering Limit Rendering in Revit-based products is no longer limited to the use of four cores on multiprocessor computers. Revit-based products can now take advantage of as many cores as are available on your computer.

Access to Autodesk® Green Building Studio® Web-Based Services (Available with Subscription to Revit Architecture)

• More smoothly extend BIM workflows to include sustainable analysis. With more than 1.6 million virtual weather locations across the globe, the climate information used in analyses can be more local, accurate and current.
• By using the power of cloud computing, Green Building Studio can generate analyses in a matter of minutes, thus helping architects and designers to iterate through multiple design options earlier and more often.
• For new buildings projects, whole building energy analysis can help predict more accurate building operation costs before construction. For renovation and retrofit projects, the software helps users to make the most efficient design choices.

Don’t forget to bookmark: http://www.revit2011.info

Professional Resources for Revit Content

Searching the internet for good quality Revit content can take some time.  Fortunately I’ve come across a couple good quality sites that may interest you in your hunt for quality content.  The sites I’m listing here are not the only options out there for content, but they each have a very different approach to content and may cater to your content creation philosophy.  The content ranges from groups, fill patterns, families, models, rendering materials, etc.

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Autodesk Seek

http://seek.autodesk.com/

There’s no better place to find content other than the source.  Most of the content found on Autodesk’s website is directly from manufacturer’s and are, to some degree, modeled to the Autodesk family standard.  Be careful though as some of these models are overly detailed.  But probably one of the best places to start for Revit content.

Autodesk Seek

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Little Details Count (paid)

http://www.littledetailscount.com/

Little Details Count is a website focused clearly on one thing, highly detailed & render-able Revit families and models.  While this approach sounds ideal, it’s really not that great for large commercial projects, because of the larger file size and increased polygon count for rendering.  What this IS ideal for are those residential projects that are smaller in scale and affords you more time to put into the details.  The only other issue I have is most of the content that is on the website right now, well it’s fluff.  It’s pots & pans and paper towels & teapots.  It’s the fluff you use for renderings, the problem being, if you want a good quality rendering, chances are you aren’t going to do it in Revit.  Autodesk never really intended Revit rendering for that purpose, hence the crippled Mental Ray.  What Revit rendering IS good for is design charette type renderings, where you want to study lighting or massing, or preliminary renderings before exporting to 3ds max and THEN adding fluff.  So I’m digressing a bit, but all this aside, these are really great families.  They’re considerably inexpensive and very well built.  So if you’re building a small casino, or building a residential project in Revit and doing a lot of final renderings in Revit, these are the families for you.

Little Details Count - "Highly Detailed Revit Families & Models"

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Revit Content All-in-One (paid)

http://revit-content.com/

Revit Content has a slightly different approach. Most of their content revolves around making the family as flexible as possible. I can appreciate this approach as it makes for a very efficient family (and you know it’s well built if it’s that flexible). A huge plus. But this is one of many benefits. First, you can easily update a lot of content. Second, you have a smaller more condense Revit family library. Third, your project files are greatly reduced in size. There are huge benefits to this approach.

From their website it seems that they have a very diverse and full content library to choose from, I’d imagine the content is relatively affordable considering all the flexibility you get in “built-in”. And lastly they have a very unique “content update notifier” allowing customers to know when a newer version of the family comes out. A very professional and well thought out approach to quality Revit content creation.

Revit Content - "Just Professional Revit Families"

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RevitCity (free)

http://www.revitcity.com/downloads.php

If you ask most people new to Revit where they get their content if they don’t find it in the default Autodesk library, there’s a good chance the first words out of their mouth are, “Revit City”. This is good and bad. First the good, the database they have includes over 8,000 Revit families, all of them searchable & sortable by division, and best of all, they are all FREE. Now for the bad. There’s no quality control. No quality control means you have no way of knowing how well built the family is. Sure they have a rating system, but most people rating the families are rating them based on how they “look” or how “detailed” they are. That doesn’t always equate to quality. Is it flexible? Does it have any parameters built-in? Is the file-size appropriate? Are the materials set up for rendering? All questions you should ask when looking for good content. And yes there are GOOD Revit families and models to be found here. It just may require some hunting.

Revit City

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Contact your Local Reseller

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/partner/search?id=1088201&siteID=123112

Most if not all vendors for Revit liklely have the capability (for a price) to create custom content for your firm or for your project.  So if you can’t find the content you need out there, don’t have enough time to do it yourself, or aren’t sure how to create content — it may be a good idea to “contact your local reseller” 🙂

Contact your Local Reseller

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Lastly I’d like to state, that while I know 3D Warehouse by Google is very popular for SketchUp, there are a couple caveats to using these models in Revit.  First, these models are made for sketchup, not Revit, and in the process of converting any third-party file format into Revit, you should be wary of the data coming with it.  These files can be very high in polygon count, they do not carry any parametric data with them, and there’s virtually no flexibility with these models.  With data like this, if it’s not encapsulated inside a generic family before importing into Revit, it can cause serious errors in your Revit file causing hard-crashes.  All reasons you’re much better off building the Revit family from scratch.

Wish List for Revit 2011?

Well here it is one month from Revit 2011 release and still nothing official from Autodesk about any of the new features, updates, or tools.  So while we wait to hear what the “actual” new features will be, I thought I’d post some of my “requests” for new features…

If you’d like to submit your own, AUGI has a Revit Architecture Wish List forum:
http://forums.augi.com/forumdisplay.php?f=856

Here they are in no particular order:

1. Better flexibility for line patterns – have you ever tried to draw gas lines, fence lines, utility lines on your site plan only to find out that those line patterns you used in AutoCAD aren’t available in Revit?  Not only are they not available, but you can’t even import the line styles.
2. Cut lines for Ramps – Granted I don’t use ramps that much, but it would be nice to have cut lines show up on your ramps like they do for stairs & floors.  Right now the only way I know to workaround this is to place a floor on a sloped workplane, or to use a break line detail component.  Seems like this should be simple.
3. Justify-align Text – I’m a big advocate for legibility and while this isn’t a big deal, it would be nice to have this feature.
4. TYP, SIM, OPP – Ability to change reference labels for callouts, sections and elevations to be INSTANCE based, not type based.
5. Revit/DWF Viewer for Android/Apple devices – This would be great to be able to pull up a view or sheet on our cell-phones while in the field, particularly with tablet/slate devices becoming more popular that run on the same Android OS / iPhone OS as the smartphones do.
6. Ability to customize system families – This has been on my list for a long time, we need a little more flexibility on how these symbols look, not necessarily how they work, just how they look.
7. Fill pattern editor – Again something that’s been on my list since the AutoCAD days when it was called hatches.  They use the same .pat pattern files but there really isn’t a good graphical way to edit these files, only in Notepad, which tends to be a lot of work.
8. Duplicate Sheets – Not sure why we can’t duplicate/copy sheets.
9. Snap-to-Grid on Sheets – Again, view alignment would be nice here.
10. Lock/Protect elements or categories – It would be great if pinned objects couldn’t be deleted.  Or if we had the ability to lock or protect certain elements or categories.
11. Ability to use % or degrees for slopes – currently Revit only accepts rise/run, but we use percentage slopes a lot for site, floors, ramps, roofs, etc.
12. Purge Tool Update – as of now Revit does not purge line styles, line patterns, materials, or fill patterns.
13. Spell Check – Shouldn’t we be able to spell check the entire project and all the sheets at one time instead of view-by-view?
14. Tool Placement on Ribbon – It would be great if they standardized certain tools on the ribbon so they were placed in the same spot every time in the menu instead of floating around being contextual.  I can’t tell you how many times I click on the wrong icon because I was anticipating a command being there and it was in a different spot.  The perfect example of this is cut/copy/paste — it’s in one spot on the modify bar (far left) and in the contextual bar it’s always (far right).  Go figure.   If anything though it helps you learn the keyboard shortcuts 🙂

I have more, but this would be a great start.

Webcast: Designing in Revit Architecture & 3ds Max Design

This should be an excellent webcast for interior designers in Revit.  I know interior designers are always hesitant to use Revit on smaller TI projects, well here’s the chance to see how to do it!  (or at least how Autodesk  does it).  Whether you know how to use design options or not, I think what will be most interesting is how they explain the workflow and moving back and forth between Revit & 3ds.  Anyhow, enjoy!

From:  Autodesk | Building Media Center

The Magic Revealed: Design Options and Updates in Revit Architecture and 3ds Max Design

Wednesday, February 24, 2010, 10:00 am

Get an insider’s view of how Autodesk® Revit® Architecture and Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design work together so that design options can be created and managed without creating separate models. In this session, Amy Fietkau and Eddie Perlberg, AEC Technical Specialists for Architecture and Design Visualizaiton, will show a Tenant Improvement project where they are renovating the interior and need to evaluate some design iterations. They will show how the design options are developed and refined in Revit. When high end renderings are needed to sell the client on the designs, they show how 3ds Max Design is used to manage the design options within the same Revit model. See the magic of Design Options and Updates revealed, and learn:

• How design iterations are developed and managed in Revit Architecture using a single model
• How to manage these same design options in 3ds Max Design using a single file
• Experience a new way of developing designs for sharing and selling to clients

Revit 2011 coming soon?

UPDATE: Release date set for April 8th

Well this time last year the details of Autodesk Revit 2010 were released along with webcasts showing off all the new features. Yet here we are still with no details (well publicly available) about Revit 2011 and the released date less than 2 months away.

Never fear, once Autodesk releases their press-release you’ll see the final list of new and improved features for Revit 2011. So bookmark this site and I promise you I’ll publish the feature post as soon as the news becomes public. Let’s just hope they don’t pull an “Apple” and hold all the details until the release date. Now that would be traumatic.

Maybe Autodesk is just waiting for the Olympics to end, so they can garner more press 🙂

Anyhow, if you have any public information or mere speculations on what’s new in Revit 2011, please feel free to comment below.

BIM Software Poll

50+ Inspiring Quotes on Design

Most designers well know that it takes a lot of time and energy to be creative. While there are always good ideas out there, the best ideas are the ideas that are allowed to develop. Hence in part why designers find the amount of “work” it takes to be humorous and sometimes depressing. Here is a collection of quotes from some of the most well-known creative people from various creative industries and what conclusions they came to learn about design… hopefully you find some inspiring.

“The opposite of play is not work — it’s depression.” — Stuart Brown

“Leisure is the time for doing something useful.”— Benjamin Franklin

“Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.” — Louis I. Kahn

“I never design a building before I’ve seen the site and met the people who will be using it.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

“Good design is good business.” — Thomas J. Watson Jr.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint Exupéry

“If design isn’t profitable, then it’s art.” — Henrik Fiskar

“Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.” — Milton Glaser

“It’s art if can’t be explained.  It’s fashion if no one asks for an explanation.  It’s design if it doesn’t need explanation.” — Wouter Stokkel

“All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.” — Philip Johnson

“Color does not add a pleasant quality to design – it reinforces it.” — Pierre Bonnard

“Design is a formal response to a strategic question.” — Mariona Lopez

“Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere” — Mieke Gerritzen

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln

“Supposing is good, but finding out is better.” — Mark Twain

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” — Henry David Thoreau

“Good designs come from the heart, not from the brain.” — Danny Sengers

“Form follows function.” — Louis Sullivan

“The definition of an expert is someone who knows what not to do.” — Charles Willson

“My secret is being not terrible at a lot of things.” — Moby

“There is no design without discipline.  There is no discipline without intelligence.” — Massimo Vignelli

“If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written You a Shorter Letter?” — Marcus T. Cicero

“Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.” — Bill Moyers

“You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein

“Stop looking at yourself as a designer, and start thinking of yourself as a deliverer of ideas.” — Stle Melvr

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward apperance of things, but their inward signficance.” — Aristotle

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo Da Vinci

“Bad design is smoke, while good design is a mirror.” — Juan-Carlos Fernandez

“Content precedes design.  Design in the absense of content is not design, it’s decoration.” — Jeffrey Zeldman

“If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got.” — Albert Einstein

“Design is the concious effort to impose a meaninful order.” — Victor Papanek

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” — Neil Gaiman

“Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.” — Tate Linden

“The details are not the details.  They make the design.” — Charles Eames

“If the users can’t find it, the function’s not there.” — Human Factors International

“People ignore design that ignores people.” — Frank Chimero

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” — Albert Einstein

“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world.  But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” — Walt Disney

“Great stories happen to people who can tell them.” — Ira Glass

“Whenever I have an idea I write it down, even if it’s not a very good idea. Sometimes the bad ideas will lead to better ones.” — Steven Snell

“Form follows function — that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” — Dr. Seuss

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution isn’t beautiful, I know it is wrong.” — Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Math is easy; design is hard.” — Jeffrey Veen

“Less is more.” — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

“Roses are red, violets are blue. I won’t send the job unless you pay me.” — Giulio Pinotti

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” — Pablo Picasso

“Have no fear of perfection — you’ll never reach it.” — Salvador Dali

“Learning never exhausts the mind.” — Leonardo Da Vinci

I saved one of my favorites for last…

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” — Thomas Edison

Now get out there and perspire!