Principles that transfer across every design discipline.
9 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Ten Principles for Good Design
Dieter Rams · 1980
Sets out ten criteria — innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting, thorough, environmentally friendly, and as…
+4 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Principles of Decorative Design
Christopher Dresser · 1873
Argues that ornament and applied design should be governed by underlying structural and botanical principles common to every material, rather than by…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Grammar of Ornament
Owen Jones · 1856
Sets out thirty-seven general propositions arguing that good ornament follows the same structural and proportional laws across every culture and…
+2 more at this level
12 of 13 works
Dieter Rams
Sets out ten criteria — innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting, thorough, environmentally friendly, and as little design as possible — that Rams argues any design can be judged against as a check on personal taste.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Don Norman (TED)
Argues that design works on three separable levels — visceral, behavioural and reflective — and that an object people love usually succeeds on all three rather than on usability alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Matthew Butterick
Argues that a page built on a small number of standard column widths and margins reads as more coherent than one where every element is placed by eye, because a grid gives a designer's separate choices a shared logic.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kelley Gordon
Argues that a design's visual hierarchy — the order in which a viewer's eye moves across a page — is set deliberately through variation in size, colour, contrast, spacing and grouping, not left to accident.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kelley Gordon (NN/g)
Argues that whitespace is not empty but an active design element that groups related content and separates unrelated content through proximity, so removing it degrades comprehension even though no information is lost.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Christopher Dresser
Argues that ornament and applied design should be governed by underlying structural and botanical principles common to every material, rather than by copying historical styles wholesale.
Lewis F. Day
Argues that a successful repeating pattern is built from a consistent underlying structural system before ornament is added, and that mastering this hidden anatomy is what separates design from decoration.
Albert H. Munsell
Proposes replacing vague colour names with a systematic three-dimensional notation of hue, value and chroma, so colour in design can be specified and reproduced exactly rather than described impressionistically.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ernest A. Batchelder
Argues that ornament should grow out of a structural analysis of line and mass proper to its material and purpose, and teaches design as a series of exercises in that structural thinking rather than styles to copy.
Wassily Kandinsky
Argues that point, line and plane are not neutral marks but carry inherent tension and direction, so composition is the deliberate organisation of these forces rather than the arrangement of shapes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Owen Jones
Sets out thirty-seven general propositions arguing that good ornament follows the same structural and proportional laws across every culture and material, so a designer should work from underlying principle rather than copying historical styles directly.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Denman Ross
Proposes that visual design in any medium can be analysed through three underlying operations — harmony, balance and rhythm — and argues that mastering their formal logic matters more than imitating any particular style.
link checked 17 Sept 2026