Braun's Dieter Rams writes ten principles for good design — 'less, but better' still wins

In the late 1970s Rams looked at the world of consumer goods and saw 'an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises'. Braun was shipping hundreds of products a year and needed a repeatable answer to the question he kept asking himself: is my design good design?

Rams reduced good design to ten checkable principles — ending with 'good design is as little design as possible' — and ran Braun's entire product line as proof they work.

Rams joined Braun in 1955 and led its design department for roughly 40 years, producing and overseeing some 500 products — shavers, radios, clocks, kitchens — with honest materials, clear function and quiet form. In the late 1970s he wrote the ten principles as a public checklist, and ran his furniture work for Vitsœ by the same rules.

The principles became design schools' working ethic, not just a Braun style guide. Braun's SK series and TP1 radios entered museum collections, Jonathan Ive openly built Apple's hardware language on the lineage, and 'less but better' became the shorthand sustainability-minded designers quote first.

Dieter Rams joined the German appliance maker Braun in 1955 and, as head of design, spent about 40 years producing and overseeing some 500 products. His team's approach — strip away ornament, make the function legible, use honest materials, keep the form quiet — turned Braun from an electronics company into the reference point for functional industrial design.

By the late 1970s Rams was uneasy about the design world he had helped build, calling it 'an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises'. His answer was to write down what he thought made design good: ten principles, from 'good design is innovative' to 'good design is environmentally-friendly' and the famous closer, 'good design is as little design as possible'.

The list was not academic. Rams ran his own work by it, including the 606 shelving and 620 chair programme he designed for Vitsœ from the early 1960s. He was also decades ahead of the industry on environmental duty, arguing that design must contribute to protecting the environment while it was still a fringe position.

The principles escaped their author. They are taught in design schools, quoted in corporate design systems, and form the acknowledged link between Braun's 1960s output and Apple's hardware: Jonathan Ive has said Apple's designs carry the lineage of Rams. The London Design Museum still walks students through the ten rules as its working definition of 'good'.

Most design philosophies die with their author; writing them as a short, memorable checklist let Rams' scale past him.

The rules are auditable one product at a time, so they could discipline a company shipping hundreds of SKUs a year, not just one hero object.

'Less, but better' gave cost discipline and design integrity the same direction, which is why a board could live with it.

Rams applied the principles to his own catalog for decades first — the list was a report on evidence, not a manifesto.

Codifying your taste into explicit, teachable rules is what lets a philosophy outlive the person who had it — and outlive the products it was first applied to.

Rams retired from Braun in 1997 but kept working with Vitsœ. His reputation grew with distance: Gary Hustwit's documentaries 'Objectified' (2009) and 'Rams' (2018) introduced him to new generations, and the London Design Museum's 2018-19 exhibition drew large crowds. Apple's Ive publicly acknowledged the debt, and Braun re-issued Rams-era classics as heritage products. Today 'good design is as little design as possible' reads as an environmental instruction, which keeps the list in circulation.