The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content

Everything is designed—few things are designed well. Unfortunately, poor design can be detrimental to your business.

The master of good design is Dieter Rams, who developed the 10 principles of good design (also called the 10 commandments of good design). Rams is a German industrial designer who worked with Braun from the 1950s until 1995. His designs include coffee makers, calculators, shavers, radios, and office equipment. They are marked by elegance and simplicity, marrying functionality and beauty.

Rams’s famous 10 principles are usually applied to products (most notably Apple products like the iPod), but they can be co-opted for technical content as well. I would even argue that you cannot have good technical content apart from these 10 principles.

So let’s look at Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design.

Good design:

Is innovative. The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Makes a product useful. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Is aesthetic. The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Makes a product understandable. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Is unobtrusive. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

Is honest. It does not make a product more innovative, powerful, or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

Is long-lasting. It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years—even in today’s throwaway society.

Is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

Is environmentally friendly. Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Is as little design as possible. Less, but better—because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.

Can you see the connection to technical content? Think of technical content as part of the product itself—in fact, often the best technical content is integrated directly into the product. But even if the content is in a printed user guide or on a separate website, the goal is to make the instruction as seamless as possible so that use of the product is interrupted as little as possible. To do this, the content must be designed, and designed well.

This isn’t a call for beautiful content—good design and beauty are two different things. Design starts with functionality and purpose, and beauty ought to flow out of that. Good technical content (as with good design) is elegant, useful, and crisp.

On the contrary, badly designed content makes a product more difficult to use and less understandable, is ugly and a chore to read, is obtrusive, leaves out details, and often is bloated with unhelpful information. Badly designed technical content interferes with the product itself and makes the user’s experience more punishing than rewarding.

I’ve written before about technical content that is true, good, and beautiful. Dieter Rams captures that perfectly in his 10 principles. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to find examples of badly designed content, but Intext Writing is committed to good design in everything we do.

Photo credit: Nick Wade