What These Minimalist Classics Reveal About Great Design | 14 Rules for Good Design

This Spring Festival, we unpack 14 intriguing claims about good design that Paul Graham makes in Hackers & Painters.

Soon after QDaily launched, we started a column called Great Design. The curiosity behind it is simple: how are these things, each trying to look different from its peers, actually made? Usually we hunt for the newest design products, and they cover everything: posters and rugs, beer bottles and shelving, speakers and chocolate. We also talk with designers, visit studios, and dig into the stories behind design brands that take off overnight. But one question never goes away: can these designs be measured as simply "good" or "bad"?

Design is a language, except when material goods are scarce, say, when the Ford Model T is the only car in the world. Without the scheming of General Motors designer Harley Earl, we might never have suffered the paralysis of choosing a car. But as long as consumerism exists, all kinds of designs will keep being made, and we will keep looking for the one that suits and attracts us most. Of course, all too often we have no real choice and are forced to pick the least annoying one.

So is there such a thing as "good" and "bad" design? If consumers come in thousands of kinds, how do you judge the thousands of designs that try to please them?

If we go back to the most basic function of design, solving problems, the question is not hard to answer. A design that tries to cover up weak function is an annoying design. Put plainly, it is an embroidered pillow stuffed with straw, and sometimes even the embroidery is ugly. Good design must meet a need, provided the need is real and not someone's illusion or fantasy.

A designer once told this story. During the renovation of a house, the light was always poor, and everyone was debating what kind of lamp to install and where. Then someone asked: why a lamp? In the end, they cut a window in one spot, light came in from above, and nobody talked about lamps again.

The story of the pencil in the space capsule makes much the same point. Design is one link in a business, and what sets it apart is that you may have to think about where it begins before the product even exists. Many companies set aside big budgets yet treat design as a final coat of polish. Or they hire armies of market researchers to collect user opinions while ignoring the real problem behind those opinions. As the classic line goes: before the car was invented, if you asked people what they wanted, they would only have said "a faster horse."

That line is also attributed to Ford, the man behind the Model T. This is how business works: you invent a market, and another invention defeats you. Ford invented the need; General Motors invented the category. All of this is design.

We call design a language (the director of London's Design Museum has in fact written a book on exactly this, with a detailed survey) because it blends culture and technology, and because it is one way a company talks to consumers. It exists to make people understand and accept something and, if possible, to love it.

Professor Donald Norman's Design Psychology series now runs to four books. It starts with the teapot, and its latest volume deals with intelligent machines: when humans are freed from tasks they once did by hand (such as driving), how does our relationship with these objects change? All four books explore the role design plays in different settings. Thinkers such as Dieter Rams have also laid out "ten principles of good design," and anyone curious about design will not want to miss his ideas.

But the "design method" we want to introduce comes from a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. In his book Hackers & Painters, Paul Graham sets out 14 interesting claims. Graham is a wide-ranging thinker, what we would casually call smart, and he looks at design from a different angle than professional designers do. That may be why we chose him.

We have found examples to match, and will publish one set each day during the Spring Festival. Most are classic designs that have stood the test of time, or at least earned a solid reputation. Our view may be limited, so you are welcome to add your own.

Good design is simple design

"Simple" here does not just mean a clean-looking design, nor does it mean taking the "easy" way when making something. When we say simple, we mean the way things really are: the essence of the story, the core of the problem.

The idea turns up in many fields. In mathematical axioms, less is more. Many short proofs are widely considered "good" not only because they are "short" but because they come close to the laws and essence by which the (mathematical) world runs. Works of art crowded with elaborate ornament and form feel dull precisely because their inner structure is too weak to carry the decoration; underneath, they are pale and hollow.

Design is the same. When a design works hard to approach and achieve what we call "simple," it is more likely to be good design.

Cover of Pink Floyd's 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon

In the dark, a beam of light strikes a prism with glowing edges and spills out the other side, refracted into a rainbow.

The cover was designed by the studio Hipgnosis. The brief from Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright was "smarter, more elegant, i.e. a more classic design." Looking back on it, Hipgnosis designer Aubrey Powell said, "It's not just unique. It's a very simple design that combined the character of Pink Floyd at that time with all the interior design elements, like the pyramid posters and the various stickers. (In fact) it's a collection of everything."

The image of light refracting through a prism hints at the intense, distinctive sound-and-light experience of a Pink Floyd show. It is also a universal image, wondrous but not invented out of nothing, because it shows a property of light itself. The result is concise, powerful and instantly recognizable, and it became one of the most classic album covers in rock history.

The Plywood Chair, designed by Jasper Morrison

British designer Jasper Morrison first designed the Plywood Chair in 1988 for the Berlin exhibition Some New Items for the Home. The furniture company Vitra later produced and sold it.

The Plywood Chair looks ordinary but is quite special. It is extremely simple, nothing but plywood, glue and screws, and very easy to assemble by hand. Its pale color and gently curved back and legs make it look light and elegant.

The Panton Chair, designed by Verner Panton

The Panton Chair was designed by the renowned Danish designer Verner Panton, one of the most influential designers of the 1960s and 1970s. He produced many inventive designs and led the break from the Nordic tradition of teak furniture.

The Panton Chair is often called the S chair. It is shaped like the letter S, a single curve with no extra frame, smooth and flowing. It is sculptural, and it also has the curves of a human body.

When the chair was conceived, plastic and plastic chairs were all the rage, and designers in many countries were trying to make a chair molded from a single piece of plastic. Verner Panton finally pulled it off in 1960. The Panton Chair was the first one-piece, injection-molded plastic chair in history. It threw out the idea that a chair needs four legs and has the dynamic beauty peculiar to a cantilevered seat. Back, seat and base form one simple but bold whole.

iPod Classic

Strictly speaking, the iPod Classic is the sixth-generation iPod, released by Apple in 2007. It was the last major redesign of the iPod, and it kept every signature feature of earlier iPods.

The iPod Classic held a lot, up to 160 GB. Its look is especially clean, with rounded corners and a smooth surface. The front has only a color screen and a touch-sensitive Click Wheel, with no other buttons sticking out.

The wheel simplifies the product's appearance: every separate button is built into it, and most functions run through it. More important, it may well be the best solution for a high-capacity music player like the iPod. When your player holds thousands of songs and you want to play the 1,000th, holding down a physical fast-forward button wears the button out and wears you out too. Picking songs with a responsive touch wheel is plainly quicker and easier.

The iPod Classic lets people who love music enjoy it simply and purely. In the bigger picture, this product shifted power in the record industry and laid the groundwork for the iPhone.

The wall-mounted CD player designed by Naoto Fukasawa

Naoto Fukasawa designed this wall-mounted CD player in 1999, and it is a signature work for both Muji and Fukasawa himself. It looks nothing like an ordinary CD player. Fukasawa modeled it on an exhaust fan: the player hangs on the wall, you put in a CD, pull the cord hanging below, and the music plays. It is as simple to use as switching on a fan.

Kenya Hara, Muji's art director, believes the product sharpens the listener's senses, and that the designer found an unusual way to connect product and design: "When we gaze at this CD player, our bodies respond. The skin near the cheeks in particular feels unusually fine and sensitive, waiting for the music to come out the way it waits for a breeze to blow past."

The Chemex coffeemaker

The Chemex may be the most classic coffeemaker in the world. American chemist Peter Schlumbohm invented this drip coffeemaker in 1941, when most American households were still brewing with percolators.

He knew the filtration and extraction steps of lab chemistry well and used that knowledge to design the coffeemaker. He took a glass funnel and a conical flask as models, fused them into one body, and fitted a detachable wooden heat-proof collar around the waist of the curved vessel. To brew, you just set a filter and ground coffee on top, pour in hot water slowly, and wait for your coffee.

Schlumbohm also gave the glass funnel an air channel and a pouring spout. Hot air produced during brewing bypasses the filter paper and escapes through the channel, giving a cleaner extraction.

As Peter Schlumbohm himself intended, the coffeemaker makes brewing simple, and the vessel itself is beautiful.

Good design is design that can be copied

"Copying" here does not mean plagiarism but the chance of being knocked off. Most novice designers go through a stage of imitating the classics before they start making original work.

Paul Graham says that unconscious imitation inevitably leads to bad design, but once you grow passionate about something, imitation no longer satisfies you. Your taste enters its second stage, and you begin to create original work on purpose.

He makes one important point: get over yourself. If someone else has already partly answered the question a designer is trying to solve, there is no reason not to use that answer, and using someone else's work need not cost you your own character.

Balmuda air purifier

Many people know the Balmuda air purifier because of the scandal over Xiaomi's air purifier copying it. The two products are strikingly similar inside and out. One reason Xiaomi did not try to hide it: Yuya Yamamoto, a member of Xiaomi's air purifier design team, is a former Balmuda designer. Still, the traces of imitation and carry-over are far too "naked."

The Balmuda AirEngine 360° air purifier officially entered the Chinese market in early 2013 and won awards including the 2013 Red Dot Award, Japan's Good Design Award and the 2014 iF Award. Xiaomi's product did not go on sale until late 2014.

Since its founding in 2003, Balmuda has championed "pursuing perfection through simplicity." In plain terms: build a product from the fewest parts, express elegance with the simplest design, and get the best result from the least energy. Besides the AirEngine 360° air purifier, its signature works include the GreenFan electric fan series.

Back to Xiaomi. Seen as a knock-off, the reasoning goes like this: Balmuda's product had already answered part of the question Xiaomi faced in making an air purifier, so imitation was the first step. But as for borrowing someone else's flower to grow your own fruit, Xiaomi's taste had not yet reached the second stage.

The Eames dining chair

A perfect marriage of minimalism and curves, it is probably the most knocked-off chair there is. Searching "Eames dining chair" on Taobao turns up nearly 7,000 similar products. Its creators are Charles & Ray Eames, the husband-and-wife team who loom large in 20th-century design history.

Produced with the major Swiss furniture maker Vitra, the chair looks simple, just a one-piece molded plastic shell, but it hides sexy 3D curves, like a woman who is attractive from every angle. Its warm wooden legs suit wood floors, concrete, marble or granite alike. At home it works as a desk chair or a dining chair, beside a desk, dining table or bar counter, and it fits just as well in a cafe or restaurant.

The design is nearly 60 years old, yet the phrase "ever fresh with time" seems tailor-made for it. No wonder knock-offs and reproductions keep appearing.

The Braun T3 pocket radio

The German designer Dieter Rams holds a pivotal place in the design world. In theory, his "ten principles of good design" are widely accepted as the yardstick for good design; in practice, his 40 years at Braun produced countless classics.

The Braun T3 pocket radio is one of his signature works. Many young people today may not know it, but you surely remember Apple's iPod. As few buttons as possible, as many functions as possible, and a good feel in the hand made the iPod a sensation, and all of it came from Braun. Dieter Rams is one of the people Steve Jobs most revered, and the iPod's design drew directly on the Braun T3, imitating it from shape to control layout. We might read this imitation as Jobs's respect for the Bauhaus principle that "form follows function."

Braun applied that principle across many products, and Apple's borrowing did not stop at the iPod. Compare the Braun T1000 pocket radio with Apple's PowerPC G5; the Braun LE1 speaker with Apple's iMac, with their similar stands; and the Braun L60 audio system with Apple's iPod Hi-Fi speaker, both of which put the audio source on top.

The AJ lamp

The AJ lamp, designed in 1957 by the Danish master Arne Jacobsen for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, remains a classic of lighting design. In the film Batman, an AJ lamp appears in Bruce Wayne's home.

What sets the AJ series apart is its asymmetric head, which merges two forms into one and makes an elegant shade in its own right. The round hole cut into the base was originally meant to hold an ashtray, but its distinctive look became one of the reasons the lamp caught on. The series comes as a table lamp, a floor lamp and a wall lamp. The funnel-shaped shade is sculpted in free, flowing lines, and the lamp is a model of minimalist Nordic design. It is usually placed alongside Jacobsen's own Egg and Swan chairs.

A lighting series so well suited to modern interiors naturally became a favorite target for reproduction. For the lamp's 50th anniversary, a commemorative edition broke with the original retro palette of strictly black or white and added five youthful colors, making it once again a choice for young, modern homes.

Cover images from cdn.shopify.com, louispoulsen, stocktons