Jony Ive said Dieter Rams' work was the foundation for almost everything Apple designed. Rams was head of design at Braun for 34 years and designed over 500 products. Every one followed the same 10 principles:
1. Good design is innovative. Not different for the sake of it. Innovative in the sense that it solves a real problem in a way nobody thought to try.
2. Good design makes a product useful. People shouldn't have to read a manual to understand your work.
3. Good design is aesthetic. Rams didn't separate beauty from function. He believed that things you use every day shape your environment, and ugly tools make an ugly life.
4. Good design makes a product understandable. The product should explain itself. The form should make the function obvious.
5. Good design is unobtrusive. Design is not art. It doesn't exist to express the designer. It exists to serve the person using it. The moment someone notices "the design," you've already failed.
6. Good design is honest. It doesn't make a product appear more than it is.
7. Good design is long-lasting. Rams designed a shelving system in 1960 that Vitsoe still sells today...unchanged. He was designing things that would never need to be redesigned.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing is arbitrary. Nothing is left to chance. If a detail doesn't serve the whole, it doesn't belong.
9. Good design is environmentally friendly. He said this in the 1970s. Decades before sustainability became a talking point, Rams argued that wasting resources through thoughtless design was a form of disrespect.
10. Good design is as little design as possible. His motto: "Less, but better." Strip away everything that doesn't serve the purpose, and what remains is the design.