What Happens to Good Design Ideas After the Podcast Ends

Design ideas tend to disappear shortly after you hear them, especially when you’re hearing a lot at once.

Early in my career, design podcasts were how I learned. My first corporate job was at a bed-in-a-box mattress startup. It wasn’t my dream job. One day, while designing banner ads, I was asked to Photoshop a photo of Michael Phelps’ feet, our prized mattress influencer. They were worse than expected, which explained why the task landed with me. Still, it was work. I was designing.

I spent long hours driving to and from that job, filling the silence with podcasts. An hour at a time. Great ideas would surface somewhere in the middle of an episode, feel important in the moment, and then lose their shape a few days later.

The problem was not access. It was volume.

Years later, with fewer questionable Photoshop assignments, a simple idea surfaced. What if I made a place just to hold onto those moments.

I have always enjoyed building things on the web. One day, talking with my girlfriend, I said it out loud. I want to make a site for design quotes. Not just from podcasts, but from anywhere designers share how they think. Conferences. Books. Social media. So I can remember them. I’ll call it Design Quotes I Like.

Before building anything, I looked around. I Googled “design quotes.” I wasn’t prepared for what I found.

What I found were SEO farms. Endless blog posts optimized for traffic, not thought. The same famous names. The same recycled lines. Quotes stripped of when they were said or what prompted them. Even when I found something I liked, it lacked the details that made it meaningful.

AI tools were no better. Sometimes the quotes were hallucinated. Other times they were technically real, but pulled from the same contextless slop.

That clarified the goal.

I wanted to create a place to keep quotes with context. Who said it. Where it came from. When it was said. From designers I admired and others I was still discovering. What started as a personal tool became something I decided to share as a resource.
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In each quote you'll find the designers name, related categories, the source, the medium (how the quote was encountered), the year of the quote, the date it was added, and more.

Soon, each quote will also include a short summary of the conversation that led to the quote for additional context. And, I'll be adding more writting, like this, on themes I'm seeing in the quotes.

I hope you enjoy it.