quote of note

"I cannot count the number of clients who hae marched in and said, 'Give the next iPod.' But it's probably close to the number of designers I've heard respond—under their breath—'Give me the next Steve Jobs.'"

-Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, in his new book, Change by Design (HarperCollins)

"I'm not afraid of technology. Being a photographer, I always have to deal with technology, but I think technology makes people lazy and slow. Incredibly slow. Remember when we used to make a layout, in three days? These days they all get lost in technology. I've nothing against technology, but I'm against wasting energy on artificial intelligence. The other day the electricity went off in the office, and all together they [the staff] got up. They stood up, with their hands in their pockets, and said, 'What do we do! We've got no electricity.' I was so mad. 'What do you mean you've got no electricity? You've got a brain!'"

-Oliviero Toscani in conversation with Terry Jones in i-D

"He was not a great draftsman. In terms of what it means to draw beautifully, in terms of control, I don't think he was very notable....He had an enormous sense of style, and he could bring that burnished style to a product in way that enhanced its value. That was a very substanial gift. When you gave him a shoe to draw, the shoe became more sophisticated. You got something extra.

He was really not related to the field of illustration. He was an outsider who came in and proved that you could be an enormous personality, do an individual thing, and still be used successfully in commercial art."

-Milton Glaser on Andy Warhol, who he calls "the perfect commercial artist," in Tony Scherman and David Dalton's POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol (Harper)

"The women who intrigued me had the most beautiful necks and the most reponsive hand movements. At one point, I found El Greco, and that elongated look became my way of seeing."

-Photographer Lillian Bassman, whose work is on view through November 28 in an exhibition at the Staley-Wise Gallery in New York City

"People who say I'm design-obsessed should recognize that I'm creating value and the [New York City Planning] commission is creating value for the city every day that we advocate for design excellence. It adds value to the neighborhood; it adds pride of place to the people who own and live in the neighborhoods; and it's not a big deal in terms of the cost."

-Amanda Burden, director of the New York City Department of City Planning and chair of the City Planning Commission

"Craft takes time, and therefore it is luxury. You cannot do an amazingly well-made garment without taking time—not just the time it takes to make something but also the time it took the maker to come up with the idea. That is all luxury, and that has been lost because we're trying to make things faster and faster, cheaper and cheaper. The consumer tends to lose track of what luxury is."

-Fashion designer Isabel Toledo

"To the rear of the valley was the zoo with its unhappy elephant, its shuffling giraffe, its furious chimp and thrashing orangutan and spitting llamas. The artificial lake was dotted with spouting fountains. The Neverland fire station housed a big red engine. Lining all the roads were winsome statues—flute players, rows of graceful grinning kiddies, clusters of them, some holding hands, some with banjos, some with fishing rods, the bronze sculptures of carefree children gamboling among the shrubbery. In front of Michael's house was a statue of Mercury, rising 30 feet, winged helmet and caduceus and all, balanced on one tiptoe, at sunset a syrupy glow lingering on his big bronze buttocks, making them look like a buttered muffin."

-Paul Theroux on Michael Jackson's Neverland in the November 2009 issue of Architectural Digest

"It's always there in my pocket, there's no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there's this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it's over, best of all, there's no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There's something, finally, very intimate about the whole process."

-David Hockney on his appreciation for his iPhone and the Brushes application, in Lawrence Weschler's piece on the artist in The New York Review of Books

"This typeface, which also appears in my 1961 painting "Boss," recalls everything that I responded to as a child in relation to the comic books I read. Comic books were a hot issue for me when I was growing up, and for a brief moment I thought I wanted to be a cartoonist, but I never really pursued it. I wanted the world to be oversized, and overwhelming, and to kind of knock you off your feet."

-Ed Ruscha, in the October 2009 issue of Art+Auction

At right, Ruscha's "Annie" (1962)

"We have assembled a heavenly design team. By keeping the core team small and investing significantly in tools and process we can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare. Our physical environment reflects and enables that collaborative approach. The large open studio and massive sound system support a number of communal design areas. We have little exclusively personal space. In fact, the memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work."

-Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of industrial design at Apple