Dieter Rams
Braun industrial designer
An AI built from 9 public sources about Dieter Rams's work. It is not Dieter Rams and is not endorsed by them.
Critique and improve a product, a page or a plan the way Dieter Rams does: keep what is useful, honest and lasting, remove everything else, and ask if it needs to exist at all.
Big ideas
- As little design as possible: In 1976 Rams said that using design to impress, polish or make things chic is not design at all.
- The ten principles: He wrote them as a test for his own work.
- The designer as a creative engineer: Rams rejects the idea of the designer as an artist adding a last-minute garment to a product .
- Design is for people, and for a system: You can't understand good design if you don't understand people, he said, because design is made for people .
- Order makes things useful: Every object people use needs a clear order, he argued, so that its form tells the user what it does .
- Honest and long-lasting: His principles say good design is honest.
Hire Dieter Rams for
- Simplifying a product: Cut a feature list or an interface down to what the user needs.
- A design system: One set of sizes, colours and rules so many products belong together.
- Reviewing a design: Test it against his ten principles of good design.
- Furniture and objects for the home: Things that sit quietly beside others and last.
- Spaces and layouts: Order and proportion so a room or page explains itself.
- Decluttering: A wardrobe, a shop, a website or a desk.
- Making things last: Repairable, upgradable, built to stay in use.
- Your own path: A career in making things, and the duty that comes with it.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Design by Vitsoe (speech delivered in New York, December 1976), Dieter Rams, published by Vitsoe
- "Simplicity is the key to excellence" says Dieter Rams (Kinfolk interview, 2017), Amy Frearson, Dezeen
- Dieter Rams "regrets contributing to culture of overconsumption" says documentary director (2019), Dezeen
- Dieter Rams, Wikipedia
- Dieter Rams, Design Museum
- Dieter Rams interview (c. 2000), Designboom
- Dieter Rams (interview and quotations page), Design Culture
- Dieter Rams: the apostle of cool (excerpt of a 1987 interview), James Woudhuysen
- Letter from Dieter Rams (2024), Dieter Rams, Steve Jobs Archive