Less, but better.
It is a calculator. Grey body, softly domed keys in muted green and yellow, laid out on a clean grid with nothing extra anywhere. It should be forgettable, and instead it is one of the most quietly influential objects of the last fifty years. When Apple built the calculator into the first iPhone, they reproduced this thing so faithfully, the same key shapes, the same colours, the same restraint, that designers spotted the homage instantly.
Its designer, Dieter Rams, ran the design studio at the German company Braun for decades, and along the way wrote down ten principles for what good design is. They are worth knowing. Good design is innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, thorough, and, the one everything else serves, as little design as possible. His motto, in the original German, was weniger aber besser. Less, but better.
You can feel that philosophy in every object he touched. Nothing shouts. Nothing pretends to be more complicated or more exciting than it is. A radio looks like a radio, a record player hides none of its function behind decoration, a calculator gives you exactly what you need to press and not one thing more. He designed for clarity and for calm, on the belief that the objects we live with should serve us quietly rather than compete for our attention.
He was also decades ahead on the question that matters most now. One of his principles is that good design is environmentally friendly, that it conserves resources and does not add to the pollution of the world with visual and physical junk. He was asking whether a product should even exist, and whether it would last, long before that was a fashionable thing for a designer to worry about.
That is why his work still feels modern. He was never chasing the mood of a given year. He was removing everything inessential until only the honest, useful core remained, and things built that way do not date, because there was never anything on them to go out of style.
Look at what you are making and ask, honestly, what you could take away until only the essential is left.
