The Greatest Designers of our Age #1: Dieter Rams

The quiet giant

Some designers shout. Dieter Rams never needed to. His radios, record players, calculators and shelves don’t ask for your attention, and that is exactly why people still collect them, copy them and stare at them in museums more than half a century later. If there is one designer whose thinking sits underneath almost every clean, calm product you touch today, it’s Rams. That’s why he is number one in this series.

He is best known for one word, repeated in German as a kind of motto: Weniger, aber besser. Less, but better. It’s often shortened to “less is more”, but that line belongs to the architect Mies van der Rohe, and the difference matters. Rams never asked for less for its own sake. He asked for less so that what remains can be better.

Early life

Dieter Rams was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, on 20 May 1932. His grandfather was a carpenter, and the young Rams spent time in his workshop, learning how things are made by hand and why a joint either works or doesn’t. He studied architecture and interior design at the Wiesbaden school of arts and crafts, interrupting his studies to complete a carpentry apprenticeship, before working as an architect.

That grounding in architecture and joinery never left him. His products are built like good buildings: a clear structure, honest materials, and nothing added that the structure doesn’t need.

Braun

In 1955 Rams joined Braun, the German electrical company, at first as an architect and interior designer. Braun was then being reshaped by the brothers Artur and Erwin Braun, who wanted products that matched the modern, democratic Germany rebuilding itself after the war. They worked closely with teachers from the Ulm School of Design, including Hans Gugelot, and Rams quickly moved from designing rooms to designing the products in them.

His first famous piece came out of that collaboration. The SK 4 radio and record player of 1956, designed with Gugelot, replaced the heavy wooden cabinet of the time with white-painted metal and a clear acrylic lid. People nicknamed it “Snow White’s coffin”. It looked radical then. It looks normal now, which tells you how much it changed.

Rams became Braun’s head of design in 1961 and led its design team for more than three decades. Under him, Braun produced a run of products that read like a design history syllabus: the T3 pocket radio, the T1000 world receiver, record players, shavers, alarm clocks, and the ET 66 calculator designed with Dietrich Lubs. The point was never a single hero product. It was a whole family that looked like it belonged together: the same greys and whites, the same restrained type, the same small dots of colour used only where they help you, like the one green or yellow button you actually need to press.

Vitsœ and the shelf that never ends

Alongside Braun, Rams designed furniture for Vitsœ. His 606 Universal Shelving System, designed in 1960, is still made today, and parts bought decades ago still fit parts bought this year. That is the most Rams thing imaginable: a product designed to grow with you and move house with you, not to be replaced when the fashion changes. He also designed the 620 chair programme for the same company.

Ten principles of good design

Around the late 1970s, worried about a world filling up with what he called an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises, Rams asked himself a simple question: is my design good design? His answer became his ten principles, and they are as useful to a small business choosing a logo as they are to an industrial designer. Good design:

1. Is innovative. It moves with technology rather than copying what came before.
2. Makes a product useful. Everything serves the purpose.
3. Is aesthetic. Only well-made things can be beautiful, because we live with them every day.
4. Makes a product understandable. At best, it explains itself.
5. Is unobtrusive. Products are tools, not decorations or works of art.
6. Is honest. It doesn’t pretend to be more valuable or powerful than it is.
7. Is long-lasting. It avoids being fashionable, so it never looks dated.
8. Is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing is left to chance.
9. Is environmentally friendly. It saves resources and avoids visual pollution.
10. Is as little design as possible. Less, but better: back to purity, back to simplicity.

What Rams teaches a brand

Read those principles again and replace the word “product” with “logo”. They still work.

Honest. A logo shouldn’t promise a luxury that the business doesn’t deliver, or borrow the look of a bank when you run a bakery. Your brand should look like what you are, on your best day.

Long-lasting. The trendy gradient of this year is next year’s giveaway that you haven’t updated anything. Strong marks, like the ones in our Saul Bass and Paul Rand posts, last for decades because they’re built on simple shapes, not fashion.

Understandable. A customer gives your sign, your Instagram profile or your business card a second at most. If the name can’t be read at the size of a phone icon, the design has failed, however clever it looked on a big screen.

As little design as possible. One clear mark, one or two colours, one well-chosen typeface. Then use them the same way everywhere. Rams’s Braun products looked like a family because the rules never changed from one product to the next. A brand kit does the same job for a small business: the same logo, colours and fonts on the card, the menu, the social posts and the invoice.

His influence today

You don’t have to look hard to find Rams in modern products. Designers have long pointed out the family resemblance between his T3 pocket radio and early digital music players, and between his calculators and the calculator apps on today’s phones. Jony Ive, who led design at Apple for many years, has spoken often about his admiration for Rams’s work. In 2018 the filmmaker Gary Hustwit released Rams, a documentary about his life and work, with a score by Brian Eno.

Rams himself has become more critical with age, of waste, of over-consumption and of products designed to be thrown away. His later message is simple: design fewer things, and make them better.

Less, but better, at Zenn

Every logo the Zenn logo maker draws starts from that idea. A strong mark, your name set in a typeface that suits your industry, and a small palette that works in colour and in black and white. Then the Brand kit carries the same rules onto business cards, social posts, letterheads and more, so everything looks like it came from the same, well-run business. If you want to see the idea at work, type your business name into the logo maker and look at how little each design needs.

Thank you, Herr Rams. Less, but better, always.