Dieter Rams' 10 Principles of Good Design
Dieter Rams · 1976
"Rams, Braun's chief designer, reduced good design to ten checks — innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, thorough, environmentally friendly, and as little design as possible — and applied them for decades to beat fashion cycles."
In the 1970s Rams watched Braun's catalog swell with trendy radios and wrote a checklist on a single sheet: if a product fails any of ten principles, it is not good design.
The list functions as a constraint lattice: honesty forbids styling that pretends to be more capable than it is; 'as little design as possible' forbids ornament that serves no function; longevity forbids chasing seasonal silhouettes. Apple, Muji, and Linear cite it because the principles trade short-term novelty for durable coherence — every new feature must pass all ten or be cut.
What does Rams' 'as little design as possible' actually require?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Dieter Rams — Ten Principles of Good DesignWikipedia
Form Follows Function
"A structure's shape should be dictated by what it needs to do, not by decorative tradition — form is a consequence of function, not a separate choice."