What Timeless Classics Reveal About Design | 14 Rules of Good Design

This Spring Festival, we walk you through 14 of Paul Graham's intriguing claims about good design from Hackers & Painters.

Good design is timeless

Time erases most designs. The ones that survive it, still solve the problem best and stay in our memory, must owe their appeal to the design itself, not to a passing fashion. You can never catch up with fashion, but if you set aside trends and other things that keep changing, and aim for the best solution, the design is unlikely to go far wrong.

As the aircraft designer Kelly Johnson put it: "If the solution is ugly, there's a better one. It just hasn't been found yet."

So if a design from 50 or even 100 years ago still wins our admiration today, we can expect it to remain a model of good design 100 years from now.

The ET66 calculator

The ET66, Braun's most famous calculator, appeared in 1987. Its plain rounded rectangle and gently domed buttons came from the German designer Dieter Rams. After joining the German company in 1955, Rams gradually built his "less, but better" approach into its products.

One look at the ET66 calls to mind the calculator in Apple's iOS, and with good reason: the iOS calculator was modeled on it.

The 1970 Volkswagen Beetle

The Beetle was produced longer than any other single car model in history, and sold more units than any other.

The Japanese designer Mitsuhiro Shoji told us it was the first car he bought as a student. "What I find most appealing is giving old things a new life. Older products were built with a simple beauty; modify them a little and you can keep using them for good. They have an elegance of their own that modern design lacks. Isn't this exactly what modern product design should be thinking about?"

In the summer of 2003, the last Beetle rolled off the line at Volkswagen's plant in Mexico, more than 60 years after the car first appeared. Judged purely as a car, the Beetle was neither innovative nor especially accomplished, even when it debuted in the late 1930s. But the strengths a designer would notice — it was sturdy, reliable, simple to use and friendly to look at — gave the little car something many of today's complex, powerful models lack.

The Uten.Silo wall organizer

The German designer Dorothee Becker created the Uten.Silo wall organizer for the Swiss furniture maker Vitra in 1969. With its strong retro flavor, it remains one of Vitra's best sellers.

The Uten.Silo was well received from the start, and a smaller version followed. Its pockets and hooks come in many sizes and shapes, so everyday items can be stored in it and still be easy to find.

The small tools that, without a proper place to live, end up scattered all over the room can all go in it. Keys and other small objects hang on the hooks; notes and business cards slip under a metal clip.

The Alessi 9093 kettle

Since it came out in 1985, the 9093 kettle designed by Michael Graves has been one of the best-selling products in the history of the Italian kitchenware brand Alessi. It is also a landmark of postmodern design.

Its signature features are the conical stainless-steel body and the round handle, whose arched grip keeps the user's hand off the hot metal.

The most distinctive part of the 9093, though, is the little bird perched on its spout. Graves drew the idea from hearing a train whistle on country mornings, and many people bought the kettle precisely to wake to that sound of birdsong or a whistle. The bird is more than decoration; it also protects users from boiling water. When the water boils, a rubber whistle hidden in its wings sounds, as if the bird were singing — a lively, playful touch.

At first the manufacturer thought Graves's US$75,000 fee too high. When sales reached 1.5 million units, the decision to produce the kettle proved a wise one. Last year, to mark the kettle's 30th anniversary, Alessi invited Graves back to design a 30th-anniversary edition.

Leica cameras

Leica is a legend among camera makers. The first Leica, introduced in 1925, began the shrinking of the camera. It also established the 35mm film format and the vast camera market that grew up around it.

The war photographer Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, father of the "decisive moment," were among its devoted users. The Leica M, launched in 1954, was the high point of the 20th-century camera industry. It ended the golden age of the twin-lens reflex camera, led by Rollei, and forced Germany's Zeiss to give up competing head-on and turn to single-lens reflex cameras instead.

In The Mind's Eye, Cartier-Bresson wrote that when he discovered the Leica at the start of his career, "it became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it."

Today even the cheapest model in the Leica M system, the M-E, costs US$5,450 for the body alone, and the best Leica setup runs to nearly US$20,000. Yet the professional photographers who own Leicas trust its build and its lenses, and they like that it does without flashy extras. If you're interested in Leica, see our earlier story in the further reading at the end of this article: Leica at 101: What's Left Beyond Nostalgia?

The Coca-Cola contour bottle

On November 16, 1915, the Coca-Cola contour bottle, with its one-of-a-kind curves, received its patent — its birth certificate. That was 100 years ago. The bottle has long been more than a container for a drink; it is a cultural icon and a legend of packaging design.

When Coca-Cola first invited glassmakers across the United States to submit designs, its brief was blunt: the shape should make people think of the drink inside, and even if the bottle lay shattered on the ground, people should still recognize it as a Coca-Cola bottle. In the end, two designers at the Root Glass Company in Indiana found their idea in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: they modeled the curving bottle on the shape of the cocoa pod.

As design, the bottle works in three ways. First, its shape alludes to the female body and gives pure aesthetic pleasure. Second, it is far easier to hold than an ordinary beer bottle: grip the bulge and it sits securely in your hand. Third, it creates an optical illusion, making the drink inside look like more than it is.

Years later, designers distilled these three features into three widely cited rules of beverage-bottle design. If you're interested in the contour bottle, see our earlier story in the further reading at the end: The Coca-Cola Contour Bottle Turns 100: How Did It Change Our World? | QDaily Business History

The Koppel watch

The designer Henning Koppel created this watch in 1977 for Georg Jensen, Denmark's leading design house. It has a fine white enamel dial, black hands and a silver case, on a dark-green alligator strap. Striking, pure simplicity outside and rich mechanical detail inside are about the most a watch can be asked for, and the Koppel delivers both. Georg Jensen brought it back on sale at the end of 2015 for two reasons: it now carries a modern mechanical movement, and it is a classic.

Good design is redesign

Few people get anything right the first time. The second time around, they usually understand it more deeply — think of the story of da Vinci drawing eggs over and over. Strictly speaking, unless they are inventing something new, most designers are doing "redesign": drawing on their own perceptions, they keep improving things that already exist.

The Porsche 911

The Porsche 911 was born in 1963, and at birth it looked nothing like the car we know. The prototype was designed jointly by the chief engineer, Karl Rabe, and the chief stylist, Erwin Komenda. They favored a four-seater, lengthening the wheelbase by 10.5 cm and widening the body by 7 cm. The result was bulky and crudely shaped. Ferry Porsche's eldest son, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, firmly rejected the bloated design. He sent his 2+2 drawings straight to the Reutter coachworks and had its workers build the body. His insistence on beauty paid off handsomely: the 911 got its classic curves.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum

Design work on the Guggenheim Museum began in 1947 and the building opened in 1959. It has been regarded ever since as a masterpiece of modern architecture: a plain, white spiral of concrete, quite unlike traditional museum buildings. But it did not start out that way. In Wright's first sketches, the right half of the museum looked rather like an ancient ziggurat. Then Wright had a flash of inspiration and turned it upside down, which produced the classic form we see today.

Bang & Olufsen speakers

Bang & Olufsen was founded in 1925 in Struer, Denmark. From the start, the brand never measured itself by market share. For many years it has made a point of questioning convention and has released many avant-garde designs: the Beogram 6000 in 1974, the BeoLab 5 twelve years ago, and last year its newest product, the BeoLab 90.

"We want ordinary people sitting in their living rooms to enjoy the sound quality of a recording studio," says Geoff Martin, a technology specialist at B&O. A living room and a recording studio are very different spaces, and B&O's answer is cutting-edge.

In form, the BeoLab 90 abandons the traditional box shape for a triangular pyramid, combining curved wood, black knit fabric and aluminum into something like abstract sculpture.

On the technical side, B&O brought in the idea of 360-degree sound, using multiple channels, multiple drivers and reflections from multiple angles to get the best sound.

As for hardware, the BeoLab 90 is packed with Scan-Speak drivers of every size: seven 30mm tweeters, seven 86mm midrange drivers, three 212mm woofers and one front-facing woofer as large as 260mm across, 18 in all. The position and angle of every driver were settled through countless experiments.

The BeoLab 90 is a near-perfect marriage of art and acoustics, and it is priced accordingly: more than 260,000 yuan on the official website.

Tom Dixon's metal lampshades and candlesticks

Tom Dixon is a product design company whose main business is interior design. We once published an article about them, in which Tom Dixon explained in depth how materials and smell shape our experience.

"The deeper you go into the color, form and comfort of things, the more you notice the other details that act on you: the sound or the smell of a place. These can affect your experience more than the visual part does." Tom Dixon believes that the more products a designer makes, the more insight he gains, and the better he can simplify his choices and build a story around them.