Dieter Rams’s 10 Commandments of Good Design

Back in the 1980s, to help himself decide whether what he was producing was good design, Dieter Rams drew up what has come to be known as his 10 Commandments.

My personal favourite.

“Good Design is as little design as possible”

Read the full list on vitsoe.com.

His work still looks fresh many years later and is often held up as inspiration for the current aesthetic of Apple product design. You only need to look at his Braun calculator alongside the iPhone calculator or the punched aluminium casing of the Mac Pro alongside his T1000 Braun radio to see how his clarity of design thinking has endured long after the fads of a moment have been confined to the land fill.

Link Digest. February 2009

Do it, then fix it is a blog post from ad guru Dave Trott. In it he comments on something I agree with wholeheartedly. Why sit around talking about something when you can just get on an do it? One of the analogies he uses is from the film set.

“On a film set you’ll always have to choose between two ways of shooting something. The worst thing you can do is sit around thinking about it. Because you’re wasting time and money, while the actors and crew sit around doing nothing. And when you’ve done all the thinking you’re no nearer to solving it. So the best thing is just pick one route and go for it. Then you can change it as you see whether or not it’s working.”

I’m subscribed to his blog and I can recommend it. Even though every post is written like an ad end line.

Ever been doing a piece of work and needed a beautiful ampersand? Well, The Mesmerizing Curves of Ampersands is a great resource for helping to find the right one for the job. With links to download and buy – some of them are even free.

Courtesy of James Higgs, Layers is a great little tool which captures your display in a layered Photoshop file. Think Cmd+Shift+4 on steroids.

Grappling with some difficult interface design? ecommr may provide the answer through its extensive gallery of interface design elements.

Just recently found MediaShift. Haven’t spent long rummaging round but first impressions are good. In their own words. “Since January 2006, MediaShift has been tracking how weblogs, podcasting, citizen journalism, wikis, news aggregators and online video are changing our media world. MediaShift includes commentary and reporting to tell stories of how the shifting media landscape is changing the way we get our news and information, while also providing a place for public participation and feedback.”

Want to know how social media tool du jour Twitter came into being? Well now you know.

The Art of the Title Sequence is a collection of some of the most beautiful movie title sequences.

The Directory is a list of design studios, individuals, blogs, shops, photographers, resources etc. May take some time to go through that lot. If I find anything of particular interest I’ll post it here next month.

Volunteering can be so inspiring

A site that I was working on just before Christmas with the good folk over at Made by Many has recently gone live.

vinspired.com is all about volunteering. They believe in free. They do favours for free – and by doing them they look to open doors of opportunity. Run by ‘v‘ which was set up in 2006 by The Russell Commission and supported by the office of the third sector, they are working to get more 16-25 year olds volunteering. They organise events up and down the country and provide opportunities for the target audience to increase their own skills while at the same time helping others.

It’s a really great organisation with lots of life and energy.

As far as the site is concerned it was a simple reskin and tidy up of what went before. I’ve made it look more energetic and edgy and the architecture and usability have been reworked too. We really wanted to make it feel like there was a community of people all participating in activities and sharing experiences.

There’s more to come in the coming months. Go and check out vinspired.com.