Bring inspir­ing, insight­ful and thought pro­vok­ing design quotes to your work­place, home or any­where you have a computer.

They say that as a designer you should sur­round your­self with things that inspire you, whether they are books, posters, music, magazines etc.

A few days ago while going about my daily brows­ing and came across a beau­ti­ful quote:

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

— Tate Linden

I quickly found myself search­ing for more quotes about design, there are tons of really good ones out there. After a while I star­ted think­ing, wouldn’t it be great if we could dis­play these quotes on our com­puters in full­screen mode? maybe as a screensaver or an inter­act­ive slideshow?

I’m all about sur­round­ing myself with things that inspire me, things that help set a mood and get you think­ing. Over at the nclud stu­dio we have a set of LCD screens where we dis­play cli­ent work dur­ing meet­ings or some­times use to play Mario Kart. When not in use the screensavers come on and I figured, let me setup a sys­tem that allows us to dis­play these inspir­ing quotes in full screen mode, as a screensaver. What bet­ter to get you in the mood when design­ing than read­ing design quotes from some of the great minds of past times and our time?

Enter Design Quotes

Head over to http://neography.com/designquotes/ and take a look for yourself.

It is a web page where quotes appear one after another at ran­dom, I accu­mu­lated just under 200 quotes and with the help of a WP plu­gin and a bit of jQuery I was able to put the visu­alza­tion together.

How to set it up as a screensaver

Mac users can use IdleWeb, a nice little app that allows you to set up any webpage as your screensaver. Just make sure you set it up in “kiosk” mode within the screensaver options.

• Down­load IdleWeb Snow Leo­pard com­pat­ible: IdleWeb 2.1
• If you are not on Snow Leo­pard yet, you can down­load an older ver­sion here: IdleWeb 2.0 or use Web­Saver.

There are sim­ilar options for win­dows users, although I haven’t tested any of them.

Another option is to use browser plu­gins to set the browser win­dow in full­screen mode, again I haven’t tried yet, but I’m sure it’ll work just fine.

Fea­tures & improve­ments to come:

• More Quotes
• Ambi­ent Sound
• Prev/Next links
• An RSS Feed
• iPhone optim­ized version
• Color Schemes

So there you have it, enjoy and if you have any com­ments or sug­ges­tions feel free to let me know.