Legendary designer Dieter Rams came up with 10 fundamental, iconic principles of design that continue to shape how many creatives approach projects today.
His principles are:
- Good design is innovative
- Good design makes a product useful
- Good design is aesthetic
- Good design makes a product understandable
- Good design is unobtrusive
- Good design is honest
- Good design is long-lasting
- Good design is thorough down to the last detail
- Good design is environmentally-friendly
- Good design is as little design as possible
The beauty of Rams’ principles of good design is that they are nearly universal. They can be applied even to our digital landscape and app design, too, not just building interiors and product designs.
That being said, there are no such things as timeless rules. Even Rams’ principles might need to be (slightly) adapted and adjusted, and possibly even expanded with so many changes in the tech industry.
Meanwhile, you have to account for people’s tastes and preferences as well. Not every design—however balanced between function and form—will appeal to every customer. But just because someone doesn’t like what you’ve made doesn’t make your design ‘bad.’ There’s simply a disconnect between what you’re offering and what someone else wants and needs.
And yet, this should not be an excuse for pumping out low-quality designs by claiming that someone, somewhere, will still enjoy them. If you are a designer or run a design business, you need your products to be commercially viable. And that means appealing to more than tiny niches of consumers with bizarre tastes. Without (semi) mass appeal, your business won’t last long.
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During an earlier in-depth interview, international freelance graphic designer Laura Vanagaite, who specializes in branding and social media content creation, walked the Bored Panda team through design failures.
“We judge design work anyway for its design, and our eye catches mistakes very fast,” she told us previously.
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“Our brain needs less than a second to bring up a judgment, and way more time to rationalize on the topics of ‘bad’ and ‘good,’” the graphic designer told Bored Panda earlier.
“Once we spot a mistake, we tend to stop collaborating with the agency or brand because we believed that they are more reliable and able to deliver a good result. If the final result is made with mistakes, you definitely don’t want to waste your time to clean up a mess again and as well pay for the badly done service.”
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From the graphic designer’s perspective, for any business, building trust with their customers is vital.
There can be various reasons for poor designs. For example, it might be due to a breakdown in communication. Or the designer working on a particular project was less skilled than the team assumed.
“When most people hear ‘human error,’ they do not see the details; they see the person who is completely to blame,” the graphic designer explained to Bored Panda. “But this should always be foreseen by the manager who is in charge from the beginning.”
