With the announcement of the iPhone 5 my social media has been filled with design opinions. Unfortunately, most of them have been poor in quality and not thought out well. Now, I don't mean just in visual and ascetic design. I mean in product design. When I started to wonder what made a design good I ended up falling back to what the award winning designer Dieter Rams had to say about it.

Dieter Rams, for those of you who don't know, is an award winning designer from decades ago. Even though the advice is decades old it still applies to web and physical products today. The design of Dieter Rams is still influencing designs today. What he did is long lasting.

The 10 Principles of Good Design

Without further adieu…

• 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.

Continue Reading »