What Dieter Rams Knew That Your Brand Manager Doesn't.
He wrote ten principles of good design in 1976. Brands are still failing every single one of them.
The Editors, etc. · 5 min read · Design History
Dieter Rams spent thirty years designing objects at Braun. Radios, shavers, calculators, shelving systems. Clean. Quiet. Built to last. He looked at the world around him and called it, without apology, "an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises."
That was 1976. It has not improved.
His ten principles — good design is innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, durable, thorough, environmentally friendly, as little design as possible — read today less like a designer's manifesto and more like an indictment of modern brand work.
"Good design is as little design as possible. Most brands are as much design as possible. The confusion is the point."
Honest. That one in particular. Good design does not make a product seem more innovative, more powerful, or more valuable than it actually is. It does not deceive the consumer. It does not promise what the product cannot deliver. Run that principle through your last brand refresh. Through your last campaign.
The brands that age well are almost always the brands that chose restraint when everyone else chose noise. Restraint is a creative decision. It is also the harder one.
Rams didn't design for awards. He designed for use. For the person who would pick the object up, live with it, depend on it. He designed as if the person mattered more than the designer's signature.
Jonathan Ive cited Rams as his primary influence. The original iPhone was not an accident of aesthetics — it was the application of a fifty-year-old idea about what design is actually for.
Less, but better. Three words. Still the brief most brands will never give.