As Little as Possible

Someone once let dogs starve at an art exhibition and called it a statement. Someone else throws buckets of paint at a wall and calls it design. A third person pisses their name in the snow and gets photographed doing it. Fine. Art is many things and most of them are someone else’s problem.

Dieter Rams put something into words that I’ve been circling my whole working life without quite landing on. Ten principles. Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product understandable. Good design is aesthetic. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is honest. Good design has longevity. Good design is consistent down to the last detail. Good design is environmentally responsible. Good design is as little design as possible.

That last one is the whole thing. Every other rule flows from it. The instinct to add—another element, another option, another layer of visual noise—is almost always the wrong call, and Rams understood that before most of the design world was even born. I keep coming back to these ten points when something I’m working on starts to feel swollen. They don’t tell you what to make. They tell you when to stop.