Chapter 06 / 07
DESIGNS
Form follows what the work has to do. Everything else is decoration.
This chapter is about how we design. What we have designed is one page over, under Clients & Products.
The position
Form follows function
A design is a decision about what a thing has to do, made visible.
Beautiful design without a job is decoration. The most elegant visual answer is the one that arrives once the job is fully understood — the layout a broker needs on a phone between showings looks different from the one a back office needs on two monitors, and it should.
So we decide the function first: who reads this, on what, in what hurry. The form follows from those three answers, and it tends to arrive simpler than anyone expected.
Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better.
— Dieter Rams
Four steps
How a design gets made
- 01
Research
The brand, the market, and the person who will use it — before any drawing.
- 02
Concept
More than one direction, each rooted in something we learned rather than something we liked.
- 03
Design
The chosen direction made real, to the standard in Chapter 03 and Chapter 04.
- 04
Refine
Against feedback from use, not from a meeting. Then stop — the point where nothing more can be taken away.