

Dieter Rams: Principles For Good Design - gatsby
http://www.vitsoe.com/en/gb/about/dieterrams/gooddesign

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stcredzero
Something I realized while watching the choreography of Dawn Dippel and
Revolve dance company last night: The hallmark of good design/composition is
that everything is a unified, coherent whole. If your thing is composed of
multiple elements, those elements add up to a unified, coherent whole. If you
decompose those to their elements and look at just one piece, that piece by
itself should also be a unified, coherent whole.

You can see this in good choreography. You can hear this in well composed
music. You can see this in well designed software. The thing makes sense as a
whole. The pieces make sense of themselves.

Why this is so is also easy to see. It comes from the way the human mind
organizes information. We "chunk" information at varying levels of detail and
granularity. If your application makes sense, it needs to make sense at
varying levels of detail and granularity as well.

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sushi
He also mentions the same in the amazing documentary, "Objectified" by Gary
Hustwit. Highly recommended.

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ugh
I want to respectfully disagree with “Good design is unobtrusive.” I happen to
be a fan of unobtrusiveness but I think it’s not the only good way of doing
things.

Old cathedrals are seldom unobtrusive. I don’t think that they must be badly
designed because of that. We can and should allow design and art to
occasionally mingle, even at the price of increased obtrusiveness.

The nod to unobtrusiveness doesn’t seem timeless to me. It seems like a too
narrow endorsement of a particular style.

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pistoriusp
I think you might be confusing long-lived with timeless. The cathedrals are
old... Almost no one builds "cathedral styled buildings," therefore the style
is not timeless.

You're thinking too close to the object. That's precisely what makes Dieter
Rams products so good. The design and the objects are seamless.

~~~
ugh
Cathedrals are not built anymore but neither are Rams’ calculators. I don’t
think anything humans made was ever truly timeless – there is always context.

I would absolutely consider some cathedrals examples of good design, or some
chairs made 200 years ago.

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kingsidharth
Brilliant article, well designed too.

I really want the typical 'web _designers_ ' to read it who are more busy in
decoration than design.

Especially the part - _Good design is as little design as possible_. Best tip
ever. When you are left with just bare minimum - that's good design. Apple's
products are inspired by all these principles.

[2] Design just doesn't remain till visuals, it goes to code too. As I am
diving more and more in coding - I see that everything is design. How
everything is structured, how things (functions, logics etc)interact with each
other and How code becomes poetry. Those are the very principles of design.

I like how Ryan Singer, 37 Signals, puts it, _'UI is software, so designers
should know how to program."_ But that's another story for another day.

~~~
gjenkin
While I personally would prefer to follow the "good design is as little design
as possible" mantra, it's not a principle that should be followed in all
cases. Dieter Rams is speaking from a modernist school of design philosophy,
and while many companies/brands are adherents to this school, not all are.

For example, from a graphic design or typographic design perspective,
designers like David Carson (<http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/>) have
demonstrated the power of postmodernist approaches for certain brands. If
brands like ESPN or Wired adopted the "as little as possible" approach to
graphic design, your experience with those brands would be much different to
your experience today. Wired magazine would be black on white with
symmetrically placed photos and no visual decoration. That's as little design
as possible. For some people, this might be an improvement to Wired, but the
problem is that if they delivered a magazine like that, you would have no idea
that it was in fact Wired. You would forget the brand and possibly never buy
their magazine again.

So this principle - and just about every other principle Dieter Rams lists as
good design - is very specific to the brand he was working with when these
principles were developed: Braun. That's not to say that these principles are
not excellent. They are. But they are specific to their context. And the
design principles that you develop for your product or brand should be
specific to your context.

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kingsidharth
Decoration and Design are two different things. What 'Wired' does for it's
cover, internal pages is of course 'more' but most of it is decoration.
Underlaying design principle is still 'as little as possible'.

It's sort of like grid for web-design, you can decorate it no-end but grid
(design) remains design.

On David Carson's work, I see it as a work of art based on design principles.
Herd of rule of thirds? You can have as much 'more' in your photo / visual as
you want. But the design principle of 'thirds' is as little as possible.

And for rest of the stuff and more examples you mentioned - my personal
opinion is "If you hit your head with hammer long enf, it's gonna feel good
when you stop." All that more & clutter is hitting your head with hammer - it
is ugly. That is what designers like Massimo Vignelli and Dieter Rams see as
things that need to be cured. That is what inspires design.

Design is beyond brands, it's the underlaying principle of thinking.

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gjenkin
Yep true. You may have missed that I said "from a graphic design or
typographic design perspective" in my example. There are various schools of
thought to that "underlaying [sic] principle of thinking". Dieter Rams comes
from one of those schools, but his is not the only school.

~~~
kingsidharth
Hmmm, I am more into typographic designs and they follow Rams's "school" if
you say so. I can let go of Graphic Design for now. More than often, they are
just graphics... no design.

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TechNewb
Here is a mini doc on the 10 Principles by Coolhunting:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz8m9VMYRpM>

