Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Eames

Good design isn’t the effortless glide people imagine; it’s the grind of choosing, revising, and restraining until what remains feels inevitable. Charles Eames’s line flips the usual moral math. We’re trained to think “bad” is the lazy default and “good” is the heroic climb. Eames, speaking as a designer, argues the opposite: doing something truly bad takes real work. You have to ignore evidence, fight the material, override user needs, and bulldoze constraints that are trying to push you toward function. Mediocrity can happen by accident; ugliness with conviction often requires intent.

The subtext is a defense of craft against both cynicism and romanticism. Eames is saying: the world resists sabotage more than you think. A chair, a film, a toy, even a logo has physics, budgets, ergonomics, and audiences tugging it toward coherence. To make something “good” is hard because goodness is an accumulation of small, correct decisions; it’s fragile, easily broken by ego or haste. To make something “bad” is harder because you must actively defeat all the corrective feedback loops that competent processes provide.

Context matters: Eames worked in midcentury American modernism, where “good” wasn’t decoration but problem-solving - affordable materials, mass production, democratic usability. In that landscape, the quip is also a warning shot at clients and marketers: if you want to wreck a project, it will cost you. Badness is not just a lack of taste; it’s an expensive, coordinated choice.