“Interesting words need boring graphics. Boring words need interesting graphics.” — Bob Gill

“Don’t confuse legibility with communication. […] It’s a very thin line between simple and clean and powerful; and simple and clean and boring.” — David Carson in Helvetica (59:50)

“Sometimes you sacrifice legibility for impact.” — Herb Lubalin

“Whatever we do, if not understood, fails to communicate and is wasted effort.

We design things which we think are semantically correct and syntactically consistent but if, at the point of fruition, no one understands the result, or the meaning of all that effort, the entire work is useless.” — Massimo Vignelli in The Vignelli Canon (Pragmatics)

A document is not necessarily a simulation of paper. In the most general sense, a document is a package of ideas created by human minds and addressed to human minds, intended for the furtherance of those ideas and those minds. Human ideas manifest as text, connections, diagrams and more: thus how to store them and present them is a crucial issue for civilization.—Ted Nelson