Most people don’t realize they’re surrounded by Dieter Rams’s work. If you’ve ever used an iPhone, you’ve touched his influence. If you own anything designed by Apple, you’re living inside his philosophy.
Rams didn’t set out to change product design. In 1955, he joined Braun as an architect and interior designer. Germany was rebuilding after the war, and design was ornate, heavy, trying too hard. Rams looked at this and thought: what if we just stopped?
This is harder than it sounds. Removing things—really removing thems—takes nerve. Anyone can add a curve, a detail, a flourish. It takes conviction to say “this doesn’t need to be here” and mean it. Rams had that conviction.
At Braun, he designed radios, record players, calculators, razors. Everything was different. Clean lines. Honest materials. Buttons that made sense. His products didn’t scream at you. They whispered. And somehow that was revolutionary.
Here’s what’s interesting: Rams wasn’t trying to make products look minimal. He was trying to make them disappear. Good design, he believed, should recede into the background. The tool should vanish; only the task should remain. Your radio shouldn’t be about the radio. It should be about the music.
In 1976, he wrote down ten principles: Good design is innovative. Is useful. Is aesthetic. Makes a product understandable. Is unobtrusive. Is honest. Is long-lasting. Is thorough. Is environmentally friendly. Is as little design as possible.
That last one is the key. As little design as possible. Most designers add. Rams subtracted. And in that subtraction, he found something purer.
For decades, nobody in Silicon Valley seemed to notice. Then Steve Jobs saw a Braun calculator. Then a record player. Then everything clicked. Apple’s design language—the one that defined modern technology—is essentially Rams’s principles translated to glass and aluminum.
Jonathan Ive, Apple’s longtime design chief, kept a Rams-designed shelf system in his office. Not as decoration. As a reminder. When you’re lost in decisions about curves and materials and details, look at what Rams did. Then subtract more.
In his later years, Rams has become an advocate for sustainability, arguing that designers have a responsibility to create products that last. This isn’t a late-career pivot—it’s the same philosophy. Good design respects resources. Respects users. Respects the future.
The irony is that Rams’s work was so successful it became invisible. We don’t think of “Rams-style design” when we use modern products. We just think: this makes sense. This feels right. This is how things should be.
That’s the highest compliment. He didn’t create a look. He created a grammar. And once you learn to see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s everywhere. In your pocket. On your desk. In the way we expect things to work.
“I once said that my aim is to leave out everything superfluous in order to allow the essential to come through.”
— Dieter Rams Primary source“A record player, a kitchen appliance, a slide projector or a shaver with disorderly, chaotic, confusing or overloaded design cannot fulfil its functions. The harmony of a design too, its aesthetic quality, also has a functional purpose—it facilitates a positive emotional relationship between a device and its user.”
— Dieter Rams Primary source“My aim was to design [door] handles that were as simple as possible. Our living environment today is complex and polymorphic enough. I have always striven to couteract this chaos.”
— Dieter Rams Primary source“Good design is innovative. Good design must be useful. Good design is aesthetic design. Good design makes a product understandable. Good design is honest. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is long-lasting. Good design is consistent in every detail. Good design is environmentally friendly. And last but not least, good design is as little design as possible.”
— Dieter Rams Primary source“It goes without saying that we live with Vitsoe furniture systems; first, because I have only ever designed furniture that I myself would like to have, and second, getting to know the systems in daily use allows me to better recognise where they might be improved or developed further.”
— Dieter Rams Primary source“The design of products has a duty to contribute to a sustainable reduction in the number of products as a whole. Therefore the goal for product culture in the coming decades will be ‘less, but better’.”
— Dieter Rams Primary source“The Braun design department was always involved in self-initiated design studies alongside the usual daily workload. I believe that it is very important for designers to have the creative space to develop and refine their own ideas. Most of our studies never went into production—for various reasons—but they often gave important impulses to product development and our regular design work.”
— Dieter Rams Primary source“Colour was always used extremely sparingly [in Braun hi-fi appliances] and then only to provide information.”
— Dieter Rams Primary source“Good design is durable. It has nothing trendy about it that might be out of date tomorrow. This is one of the major differences between well-designed products and short-lived trivial objects for a throwaway society that can no longer be justified.”
— Dieter Rams Primary source⭐️ Less but better (1995)
Less but Better isn’t a comprehensive catalog of Dieter Rams’ work or a complete history of Braun. Instead, it’s something more valuable: a deep dive into the thinking behind some of the twentieth century’s most enduring product designs.
Thucydides Thomas Jefferson Steve Jobs Benjamin Franklin Caspar Weinberger