principles of good design

Dieter Rams is an industrial designer who wrote the book on what good design is – and it’s pretty much law in the design world. Even the Apple designers were influenced by Dieter Rams ten principles of good design when designing their products. Dieter says that all designs need to be: innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, through, environmentally friendly, and most importantly, as little design as possible. These are all great ideas and wonderful guidelines, but does a design that doesn’t follow all of these rules, mean that a design isn’t good?

The answer is somewhat complicated because it is both yes and no.

Designing is about problem solving, not our personal preference or opinion. Designing is about helping clients get what they want and what is best for their clientele. We may not like what they what, but it is our responsibility to help them get there. With that in mind, we have responsibilities to not let our clients do anything that is going to interfere with the function of what they are trying to accomplish or do anything ridiculous like making the logo the size of a bowling ball on the home page.

From what we’ve experienced it takes two things to make a client happy. A website they love and a website that targets their audience. Sometimes, the client doesn’t exactly know how to tell you what they need vs what they want. So this is where we have to make the client think. If you aren’t sure what a client is wanting, using Dieter Ram’s principles is a good place to start.

principles of good design

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Susan Sullivan

Susan lives in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex area with her husband and children. She is an avid distance runner, environmentalist, part-time beekeeper, chicken farmer and amateur photographer.

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