This Designer was so good that people copying him ruined Design

Everyone has noticed a lack of color in everything. Whether it’s your smart phone offering its color skews in 3 shades of gray and one option called charcoal, or it’s that everyone’s car is white or black. The world looks very different from the 60s to even up to the 90s and for some reason the trade off has been the feeling of soul, and the actual visual aspect of lack of color. Personality has left every part of products in the past 60 years and this can and is attributed to a lot of reasons, but I think one man has a much bigger role in this change than anyone has given him credit for, good or bad credit.

Dieter Rams

Rams was an industrial designer from the 1960s to the 1990s, he was very successful unlike most other industrial designers, a lot of people even knew him by name. His fame was earned with his very unorthodox design philosophy. Design as little as possible, function as much as possible.

This was seen as genius, a remarkable way of thinking when looking at everything else back in the day. He joined a company called Braun, a radio manufacturer turned technology manufacturing company. They created some of the most expensive consumer grade radios that the middle and upper middle class could still afford. When Rams had joined the team however, he had put his design philosophy into their newest line of products.

When looking at these products today, they look cool and or a little futuristic and almost looking not very old since things today still kind of resemble his style. There’s a very good reason for this I will mention later. When Rams published these new products, lets take a look at what life looked like

This is what the average fridge looked like.

This is what the average car looked like.

This is what the average lamp looked like.

Instead of companies trying to sell to consumers using raw performance and quality over their adversaries, they used style, and personality. Consumers werent very interested that one fridge had 20% more efficient drawer space than the other, they liked the way that one looked. That turquoise was their favorite color and the metal rails went better with their kitchen. This was how things operated with almost all purchases until Rams had come in. He believed that the peak of function, was the design itself, the “personality” of a product to him was a distraction or a gimmick to sell you the product where the product should just sell itself by how it performs. This sold a lot of radios. Braun became one of the best selling radio companies and had some of the most sales out of the country, and not only this, they were seen as a status symbol.

The bone white color and boxy shapes stood out in a house full of color and personality as the thing that performs so well, and this was perpetuated even further as only upper middle class people could afford to dish out for these items. This makes Dieter Rams incredibly famous, he still charts as one of the top 10 industrial designers of all time while not designing a thing since the 2000’s.

The Aftermath

For a long time, companies just had to sit and watch. They couldnt just copy his style as he was thriving and copying him would tarnish the companies name as the Braun rip off. Apple during these times (1990’s to early 2000’s), were still a big company, they were coming out with Mac computers that outsold competitors, but they were expensive and niche. But they did also follow this 1990s trend with see through backs with 50 different aquamarine color ways and a rainbow logo with bright advertisements. However, Jonny Ive was promoted to lead designer in 1996. If youre familiar with him, you’d know or you could easily tell that his soul inspiration for design was Dieter Rams. Rams had retired the year before from Braun so making too much homage would be in poor taste. But let’s cut to 2001, the i-Pod.

When comparing these design styles you can see virtually no difference. Jony Ive also goes on to design the MacBook, iPhone, Apple Watch, literally EVERY apple product until 2019. This leads to the “blanded effect”. We now have 6 decades of two companies controlling the market of luxury tech while the culture of the west values technology as the highest regard of status and wealth. Both of these companies follow the same philosophy, “personality is a gimmick, color is a distraction, anything unnecessary must go.” This creates beautiful products however, now every company wants this aesthetic. Cars, cant sell you on the way they look because no one cares about it, the culture has shifted. Get rid of every button and put it on an iPad, no one wants bold colors because it’s cheaper to have 4 color options, white, black, gray and red. People will buy your car if it looks like you spent all the money on its function and put no money towards making it have a personality. This has gone to EVERYTHING. You can no longer have a colorful fridge, first they don’t sell them anymore and second, our culture makes it look strange and out of place in everything that now had this monotone bland effect. Same with lamps, they all must follow the Rams philosophy, why have a nice switch on it when the button is more flush with the body of the lamp. Rams philosophy only worked so well because no one else was using it. Creating this luxurious vibe around his products as he genuinely put in the hours to not save money on the minimalism he produced, but to make sure the user had the best experience without needing to lean on something like it looking better than others. He obviously had no clue this would ever happen in the world and it’s foolish to claim he is the one should reason why everything is now one color, however, denying that he accidentally had a role in this gradual movement would be denying the influence that he truly had on the world, good and bad.