I have been reading about the history of art, design and architecture recently and came across Dieter Rams. I have been really impressed with how much influence his industrial design has had an influence on what is made now. In particular how much Jonathan Ive, the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple. There is a great article at Gizmodo about 1960s Braun products (Dieter Rams was responsible for the design of these) and how they have influence everything from iPods to Apple’s computer design.

Dieter Rams explained his design process by saying: “Weniger, aber besser” which roughly translates as “Less, but better.”

“Less, but better.”

When I first started doing website design, animated gifs were all the rage. Everyone did them because they could, not because they ever offered anything to the design. They were awful, still are and occasionally people still use them. They scream out: “Powerpoint 1996″. There were dancing skeletons, explosions, jiggling letters and a whole host of odious gifs to test your eyes.

What is worse… Java reflections or splash pages?

Then not long after everyone starting giggling and pointing at anyone who would think of using a animated gif, we started to see Flash and Java creep in. Most if not all of this was detracting from the site design. The biggest offender was the flash splash screen. A pointless ten seconds of moving letters bouncing around the screen or the entire browser screen filling with water. An endless array of annoying and twee introductions that never gave you any useful information. They were just indulgent and prevented you getting to the information you needed to.

I still get asked by clients if they can have a splash page. I say if you insist on it, I can recommend someone who will do you one but I won’t and give them the reasons.

I have been guilty though of doing all of these thing in the past and excitedly getting carried away by the latest trend.

Dieter Rams’ ten principles to “good design”

So this brings me back to Dieter Rams’ ten principles to “good design” which he summarised as:

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible

Copyright Dieter Rams, amended March 2003 and October 2009

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Tags: Apple, Design, Dieter Rams, Flash, Java, Jonathan Ive