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Comment by kingsidharth | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant article, well designed too.

I really want the typical 'web designers' to read it who are more busy in decoration than design.

Especially the part - Good design is as little design as possible. Best tip ever. When you are left with just bare minimum - that's good design. Apple's products are inspired by all these principles.

[2] Design just doesn't remain till visuals, it goes to code too. As I am diving more and more in coding - I see that everything is design. How everything is structured, how things (functions, logics etc)interact with each other and How code becomes poetry. Those are the very principles of design.

I like how Ryan Singer, 37 Signals, puts it, 'UI is software, so designers should know how to program." But that's another story for another day.

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While I personally would prefer to follow the "good design is as little design as possible" mantra, it's not a principle that should be followed in all cases. Dieter Rams is speaking from a modernist school of design philosophy, and while many companies/brands are adherents to this school, not all are.

For example, from a graphic design or typographic design perspective, designers like David Carson (http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/) have demonstrated the power of postmodernist approaches for certain brands. If brands like ESPN or Wired adopted the "as little as possible" approach to graphic design, your experience with those brands would be much different to your experience today. Wired magazine would be black on white with symmetrically placed photos and no visual decoration. That's as little design as possible. For some people, this might be an improvement to Wired, but the problem is that if they delivered a magazine like that, you would have no idea that it was in fact Wired. You would forget the brand and possibly never buy their magazine again.

So this principle - and just about every other principle Dieter Rams lists as good design - is very specific to the brand he was working with when these principles were developed: Braun. That's not to say that these principles are not excellent. They are. But they are specific to their context. And the design principles that you develop for your product or brand should be specific to your context.

Decoration and Design are two different things. What 'Wired' does for it's cover, internal pages is of course 'more' but most of it is decoration. Underlaying design principle is still 'as little as possible'.

It's sort of like grid for web-design, you can decorate it no-end but grid (design) remains design.

On David Carson's work, I see it as a work of art based on design principles. Herd of rule of thirds? You can have as much 'more' in your photo / visual as you want. But the design principle of 'thirds' is as little as possible.

And for rest of the stuff and more examples you mentioned - my personal opinion is "If you hit your head with hammer long enf, it's gonna feel good when you stop." All that more & clutter is hitting your head with hammer - it is ugly. That is what designers like Massimo Vignelli and Dieter Rams see as things that need to be cured. That is what inspires design.

Design is beyond brands, it's the underlaying principle of thinking.

Yep true. You may have missed that I said "from a graphic design or typographic design perspective" in my example. There are various schools of thought to that "underlaying [sic] principle of thinking". Dieter Rams comes from one of those schools, but his is not the only school.

Hmmm, I am more into typographic designs and they follow Rams's "school" if you say so. I can let go of Graphic Design for now. More than often, they are just graphics... no design.

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