Dieter Rams is one of the most well known and successful industrial designers, known for his brilliant work at Braun for over 30 years. Rams followed the approach “weniger, aber besser” which translates to “less, but better”. To give you a deeper understanding of that philosophy, Rams is quoted as saying that Jonathan Ive and the team at Apple are the only company today that still follow what he believes are the core values of design.

At the age of 78, Rams says he doesn’t own a computer, but his Ten Principles for Good Design certainly apply a great framework for web design:

Gone are the days of geocities websites. Thank God. Innovative web design evolves with and is developed with the latest in web technologies, such as semantic HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript libraries, with an eye kept on future technologies.

A good website design serves as a purposeful portal. Whether it is a social portal or an information portal, good web design focuses on the usefulness of a site to an end user, while excluding any elements that may detract from the user experience.

A site can be tremendously useful, but to keep traffic coming back, it needs “the look”. Even the extreme simplicity of a site like craigslist holds in itself an aesthetic beauty.

Good web design explains itself. Easy to use navigation and straight forward user interfaces are at the core of any good design.

Good web design is, for lack of a better word, moderate. Hot pink, 144pt article font certainly won’t keep your visitors coming back.

Hidden pay-per-click links and multi-page articles to increase pageview counts do nothing for the user, and certainly have no place in a good web design. A good web design does not manipulate users for the gain of the site’s owners.

Good web design is timeless. A trendy design may bring a repeat customer back sooner for a web designer, but a long lasting design focuses not on fashion, but builds and helps carry on the legacy of a brand.

Web designers and design recruiters love to talk up “pixel-perfect design”, but there is some enduring truth to these industry buzzwords. Sharing a common canvas with comparable work from other artists, the little things matter big in web design. The right color for a checkout button or the proper use of white-space can turn a great site in to a horrible site.

The web is its own eco-system. From cutting down on bandwidth use, to preventing visual pollution, a good web design is web environment friendly. Clean code, cross-browser compatibility, and minimal resource requirements. That’s green web design.

That 3 minute animated-Flash splash page to your website might be pretty cool the first time, but does it add to the experience of your site’s users? “Weniger, aber besser”. Less, but better. Words to live by.