Ten principles for good design

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By Dieter Rams


Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd, with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759, USA, and 61 Tai Seng Avenue #02-12, Singapore 534167. Text by Bimo Dwianugrah Photograps are taken from the website Library of Congress Control Number 00112233 Design: Bimo Dwianugrah Prakoso Distributed by Asia Pacific Berkeley Books Pte. Ltd. Tel: (021) 86903103 Fax: (021) 8209832 10 09 08 6 5 4 3 Printed in Jakarta


TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 Bibliography

i - ii 01 - 02 03 - 04 05 - 06 07 - 08 09 - 10 11 - 12 13 - 14 15 - 16 17 - 18 19 - 20 21


INTRODUCTION Dieter Rams’ during his early age.

Dieter Rams was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1932. He was strongly influenced by the presence of his grandfather who was a carpenter. Rams’s early awards for carpentry led to him training as an architect as Germany was rebuilt in the early 1950s. tRams applied for a job at the German electrical products company, Braun, in 1955. He was recruited by Erwin and Artur Braun following the death of their father and his job was to modernise the interiors of the company that was launching revolutionary electrical products. Rams became a protégé of the Ulm School of Design (successor to the Bauhaus) luminaries Hans Gugelot, Fritz Eichler and Otl Aicher. He quickly became involved in product design – famously adding the clear perspex lid to the SK4 radiogram in 1956 – and was appointed head of design at Braun from 1961 to 1995. i


Together with his design team, he was responsible for many of the seminal domestic electrical products – and some furniture – of the 20th century. In his first year at Braun, a 23-year-old Dieter Rams presented a sketch of his proposals for the new interiors at the company. On the back wall of the boldly modern scheme can be seen the very first notion of a track-based, wall-mounted storage system. In 1959, Dieter Rams asked Erwin Braun if he could design furniture for Niels Vitsœ and Otto Zapf. Braun’s spontaneous answer was “Yes. It will help the market for our radios.” A year later the wall-mounted 606 Universal Shelving System was launched. The dual career of Dieter Rams continued until his retirement from Braun in 1997. He remains convinced that the very best design can only be achieved from design teams within companies. He continues to work with Vitsœ to this day.

Dieter Rams’s 1955 sketch.

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RT 20 tischsuper radio, 1961, by Dieter Rams for Braun

RT 20 tischsuper radio, 1961, by Dieter Rams for Braun

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01 GOOD design IS INNOVATIVE. The first principle is based innovation. A designer must always keep the fact that innovation can make all the difference in a good design in mind. There are two base aspects, the first one is, Approach each project with an innovative mindset and critical thinking, and always try to push your ideas forward, exploring new boundaries. Use creativity as an innovative tool to stand out.The second is, always keep up to date with the new stuff around you, using them for new ideas or to achieve new goals later down the line. Managing innovation is a hard task that’s constantly evolving, but always keep an open mind to try new ways to create and give yourself some time to try them. Only like this can you have a better range of options to create good design.

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Cylindric T 2 lighter, 1968, by Dieter Rams for Braun

TP 1 radio/phono combination, 1959, by Dieter Rams for Braun

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02

GOOD design makes a product useful. The first aspect is useful for the people. When you a have a good design that makes it easy to find what the people is looking for and display of information, it can make the design useful. The second aspect is useful content. Your content is the most useful part of a design, without great care with your content you can easily lose a key feature that makes you design useful. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

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TS 45 control unit, 1962-64, by Dieter Rams for Braun

L 450 flat loudspeaker, by Dieter Rams for Braun

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03 GOOD design IS AESTHETIC. The aesthetic quality of a good design is the balance between the visual details and the usefulness of it. From a purely design-orientated perspective there are three points that can help a designer achieve good aesthetic quality. Colour; Work your colour schemes carefully. Try different combinations and think about the meaning of certain colours. Be prepared to have different experiences on different surfaces, you won’t have as much control on the way a colour is displayed on a monitor as you have on a printer or an object. Grid / Space; When you’re composing the base structure of a design, you make decisions on how information is displayed to the people – keep it in some kind of order or grid and work the white space really carefully. The different sizes/ symmetries/orders of information effect how the human eye interprets the content. Typography; The way you display the text and choose a typeface has more importance than many people think, to be able to read and highlight different content is based on the typography you choose for a good design.

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TG 60 reel-to-reel tape recorder, 1962-64, by Dieter Rams for Braun

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ET 66 calculator, 1987, by Dietrich Lubs for Braun


04

GOOD design makes a product understandable. To make a product easy to understand, you have to have a clear view of the goals that the product has in order to design for those goals. You must keep the ease of use and how easy it is for a user to reach their goal in mind. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

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606 Universal Shelving System, 1960, by Dieter Rams for Vitsœ

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05 GOOD design is unobstrusive. The unobtrusiveness of a product must rely on two main points: In the purely design-orientated point of view, Mies van der Rohe has this wonderful phrase: “less is more.” It’s really easy for a designer to get lost in decorative and graphic details, but don’t! Keep the content live – the user must reach the information as fast as possible, then work on the graphic detail from there. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

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Braun BN0046 range

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Braun BN0021 range

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06 GOOD design IS honest. Honesty in a design is having an open approach to the people, always giving them all the options and not making your design more important than it really is. An honest design presents something that helps people reach their goal. It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

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SK 2 Radio 1955 Artur Braun Frit zEichler for Braun

SK4, Snow White始s Coffin, by Dieter Rams for Braun

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07

GOOD design IS long lasting. It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society. The most important thing is to keep the visitors pleased with your design, and you must always be comfortable with your work. These two aspects can trigger a redesign, that, in our current age, will usually happen every two years.

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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

FS 80, 1964, by Dieter Rams for Braun

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08

GOOD design is thorough down

to the last detail. This principle is self-explanatory. Leave nothing behind, craft every pixel of your design as though it was the most important, try to view your ideas from different points of view and carefully design the experience of looking at your design. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.

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volume

T2 Pocket Radio, 1958, by Dieter Rams for Braun

Electric Shaver S60,1958 by Dieter Rams for Braun

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09

GOOD design is environmentally friendly. Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

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T3 Pocket Radio, 1960, by Dieter Rams for Braun

LE1 Loudspeaker, 1959, by Dieter Rams for Braun

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10

GOOD design is as little design as possible. And last but not least, the principle that can make the real difference in good design – always be aware of the goal of your ideas, create systems that are transparent and easy to use, concentrate on the essential features of a website when designing it and keep it simple and clean to be better understood by the user. The best design is the one you experience and not the one you stand for. One of the most important ideas to retain from these principles is that we design for humans. They are the ultimate goal of our product, we always have to keep this in mind when creating a new product. Like Rams said, “The designer is the user’s advocate within the company”, we have to create something rational, but at the same time emotional.

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BIBLIO GRAPHY https://www.vitsoe.com

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