Design icon Dieter Rams has 10 principles of good design that are relevant to all professionals to this day. For him, good design is innovative, makes a product useful, aesthetic, makes a product understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, thorough to the last detail, environmentally friendly, and has as little design as possible.
No matter if you’re designing a poster, building, tech product, or piece of furniture, you can avoid plenty of mistakes if you at least keep these principles in mind. Ideally, what you should be aiming for is a healthy balance between function and form, without obsessing over either one too much.
Function without form ignores humanity’s need for beauty and eye-pleasing details. What’s more, you need more than function to sell products, and visually appealing designs get sales.
Meanwhile, form without function leads to aesthetic yet uncomfortable products that are mainly there to look artsy without much substance. In both of these cases, the designer fundamentally misinterprets their clients’ needs.
If good design embraces clarity, bad design revolves around confusion.
Poorly-designed products often hide their main function through unnecessary, convoluted features. They are not intuitive, nor are they self-explanatory. So, they push consumers away.
What’s more, bad designs are also distracting, difficult to use, forgettable, and short-lived.
There are many reasons why these mistakes happen in a design setting, but mainly, it usually involves a lack of feedback, for example, from the designer’s peers, superiors, clients, focus groups, family, friends, etc. The more constructive criticism you can get, the better the product… so long as you don’t let go of your vision to try to appeal to everyone all at once.
Setting your tastes and personal preferences aside, not all design decisions are equal. Some are objectively better than others because they take the wants and needs of the end users into account.
In other words, good design is empathetic and consumer-friendly. Bad design, on the other hand, is solely driven by the creator’s ego and lacks self-awareness and foresight.
Of course, every professional makes mistakes. That’s how we all learn, improve, and grow. However, how you respond to failures says a ton about your work ethic, character, and priorities. Being criticized and getting rejected is unpleasant, but it is an unavoidable part of life.
There is a world of difference between having a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. And it can make all the difference for any professional’s career, whether they’re in design or not.
Someone with a growth mindset fundamentally believes that they have the capacity to learn and improve. For example, a designer with a growth mindset, who makes low-quality designs and gets feedback from their supervisor, accepts what they’re being told and knows that they can meaningfully develop their skills.
Of course, individuals with a growth mindset are not naive. They understand that improving their skills requires lots of time, effort, and energy. However, they have internalized that success is possible through their consistent and focused actions.
For people who have a fixed mindset, these things are not as obvious.
