Saul Bass in an interview:
I’m dealing with what a designer has to be concerned about. What I am saying is that aesthetics are your problem and mine, nobody else’s.
...
There’re a lot of firms, a lot of designers who just do the work and get paid and make a buck and are happy. And there are many many designers, I would suspect more, that really do care about those things. But I think it’s very important for us not to be under any illusion that anybody else cares.
Norman Potter, What is a designer:
Drawings can never be an end for a designer (excepting an illustrator); they are a means to the end of manufacture, and their expressive content is strictly limited to the purposes of relevant communication. ...This does not imply that drawings can be loveless, slovenly, or inadequate in any way, but that their nature is strictly purposeful. It may indeed be necessary to the designer to make loving, scrupulous and over-adequate drawings for his own self-satisfaction and to preserve his own standards. Only in this sense are design drawings ‘self-expression’.
Beatrice Warde, The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible:
There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself; you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. The ‘stunt typographer’ learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.