Best Book You Should Have As a Designer

Whether you realize it or not, you've been touched by the work of Dieter Rams. 

He's created and inspired some of the most iconic products and designed objects in recent history and his life's work and design process is beautifully documented here throughout the nearly 400 pages of full-color photographs and carefully crafted text.

It's the arc of the designer’s life though that I find even more compelling.
 
Our environment, our mentors, the places we visit and return to, the objects we hold, and the words we hear as children; these are the experiences that shape who we become as designers. 

This lens, through which the world is filtered and focused, is uniquely our own.
 
Finding this voice is a life's work, of course, and Mr. Rams’ is thoughtfully curated here.

We learn the motivations of his aesthetic

How he spent time in his grandfather's workshop working with his hands, shaping and molding.
 
His innate sense for the physical properties of materials. His empathy for the human experience of machined commodities.

His willingness to defy convention and a singular focus on reducing design solutions to their elemental qualities led to this vast portfolio of products, some of which are still being manufactured today.

His aesthetic influence is present in contemporary designers like Jonathan Ive, in the devices we can't keep our hands off of, and his ethos expressed most poignantly in his timeless ten principles of good design.

A phrase that I thought neatly summed up where I'm headed this year and moving forward and that it was inspired by the writer of this book "Dieter Rams".

And, in case you haven't guessed it by now, that phrase is: less but better.

And these words aren't my own, of course, they're the words of Dieter Rams, yet they feel like the advice my grandfather might offer me if he were here today.

The kind of thing he'd say without actually saying it. 

His tools and memory and philosophy toward making and craft live on the whole design industry.

I love the idea that one day my grandchild ren may listen to my words echoing in their studio and keep my tools with the same reverence. 

Perhaps the real gift this book has given me has taken me a long time to fully understand and appreciate, and that is that an ethos doesn't need revisiting every January, it guides you every day as you do your work, unwavering in its conviction, unfailing in its simplicity, all that it needs to be and nothing more.

Now, if this book hasn't made its way into your library yet be sure to add it to your wish list

For context, depth, and to understand the full measure of Dieter Rams importance in the design world.

Tell me in the comments below: do you have your own principles of good design that guides your work?