If there ever was a council of modern design then Dieter Rams would probably be leading it. At the very least he would be in some VP type of role. He has influenced a number of designers, most famously Jony Ive from Apple. Back in the 80s he saw how industrial design was going in a direction that he didn’t think was suitable for great design and wrote 10 principles that he felt would help guide designers down the right path.
Again, these were written in the 80s before the proliferation of the web, but it is interesting to see how well they do apply to not only industrial and print design, but to web design as well.
1. Good design is innovative
This is probably something that the web could do a better job of, but unfortunately it is very limited to the tools at our exposure. By tools I don’t mean development tools, but the actual tools that we use to interact with the web. When you are so worried about making something work across a number of browsers it can be hard to push the boundaries of where you want to go.
You can see the power of having to only work in a single browser with The Wilderness Downtown. Some will argue that Flash was the perfect way to get exactly the same experience across a number of browsers, but Flash performance wasn’t up to the level that many companies want their experiences to be.
2. Good design makes a product useful
Color. A very, very pretty design, but who actually found it useful? The design itself didn’t communicate the purpose of the application and therefore it failed. The first versions of eBay, Yahoo, Geocities, etc. were hideous, but they did enough to make the product useful. This didn’t make them good designs, just effective designs. Color couldn’t get the effective (useful) part down.
3. Good design is aesthetic
For some reason this still seems to be a point of contention in all industries. I often hear people say that “good design just works”, which I don’t believe in. If that was the case then we would never need to improve anything because the majority of items that we use work as their intended function.
Craigslist was never good design. It was just a design that was able to build a community that worked in spite of its design. When it comes to some websites, community will trump design, but if you can combine both then you have a winner.
4. Good design makes a product understandable
I feel like I could reference Color all over again here, but instead I will do a bit of exploring. The very first Twitter homepage didn’t do a very good job of showcasing the potential of Twitter or letting people know what it really was. Part of this was because the people behind Twitter didn’t really know what they had.
Playing with an iPhone though the design helps to make a product understandable. Look at the simple lock screen. Have you noticed that there is a light that goes behind the words “slide to unlock” moving in the direction of where you should slide? It’s a very subtle design, but it subconsciously helps you to understand what you need to do.
5. Good design is unobtrusive
un·ob·tru·sive/ˌənəbˈtro͞osiv/
Adjective: Not conspicuous or attracting attention.
This one I am kind of torn on because aesthetic design attracts attention. Any Apple product attracts attention, but I guess the aesthetic itself doesn’t attract attention away from using the device. It aids it. Many beautiful websites though do a great job of attracting attention on the design without having any focus on what the site should be used for. You can see a couple of examples of this in Double-Take Design.
You are also starting to see this trend occur a lot on Dribbble. It is very hard to gather how a design will pan out from a small 400×300 image, but a lot of the designs seem to be done to attract attention more than aid the functionality of the design. Good design is invisible as some would say. Of course there is a very fine line between invisible, attractive, hideous and plain.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar