10 principles that should guide every designer

Design is hard as designers must balance utility, their personal aesthetics, and client demands - all at once. Therefore it's important to have general principles that can guide one through specific design challenges. Here are iconic designer Dieter Rams' 10 design principles👇

"Good design is innovative." Good design brightens up the user's day or product experience. It uses new ideas, new tech, or new perspectives to add a fresh spin to the product or the service.

"Good design makes a product useful." Why do people buy a product? To use it. Therefore, good design must add to a product's usefulness. Rams writes: " Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it."

"Good design is aesthetic." Products are touched, seen, often heard, and always experienced. That's why it's important that products and services be designed with aesthetics in mind. This makes for repeat pleasurable encounters with the product or the service.

"Good design makes a product understandable." At best, good design is "self-explanatory." If that's impossible, then the design must convey with maximum possible clarity the product's functions and structure.

"Good design is unobtrusive." While aesthetics are important, they shouldn't get in the way of utility. Good design is often invisible because it's unobtrusive.

"Good design is honest." Design shouldn't over-promise or exaggerate. Design should refrain from the temptation to be decorative. Design should never aim to cover up a product's faults or "manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept."

"Good design is long-lasting." Products that aim to be fashionable might succeed in the short-term, but in the long-term they are quickly "antiquated." Rams calls today's world a "throwaway society" - products are used and discarded. Good design pushes against this.

"Good design is thorough down to the last detail." There's nothing random or arbitrary in good design. Rams writes: "Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user."

"Good design is environmentally-friendly." It is the designer's job to minimize "physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product."

"Good design is as little design as possible." Fluff is design's enemy. Rams writes: "Back to purity, back to simplicity."