According to this Gizmodo post, Dieter Rams’ (a designer for Braun in the 50’s and 60’s) work can be seen influencing the designs of one of the most currently prominent industrial designers, Apple’s Jonathan Ive.
Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:
- Good design is innovative.
- Good design makes a product useful.
- Good design is aesthetic.
- Good design helps us to understand a product.
- Good design is unobtrusive.
- Good design is honest.
- Good design is durable.
- Good design is consequent to the last detail.
- Good design is concerned with the environment.
- Good design is as little design as possible.
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January 14th, 2008
Over the past few months, Not Too Stale has become quite the opposite. The frequency of my posts here have been reduced to a slow crawl. I can legitimately use excuses like being busy with work and the holidays, but the primary reason is that some of my posts have a new home. You can find them on my Tumblr blog.
Since most of my posts are links to things I find interesting, videos, images, and quick thoughts, a tumblelog is a great fit. Plus, with mobile posting by email and other quick post methods, Davidville’s Tumblr is also dead simple to use.
From Tumblr.com:
What’s a tumblelog?
To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.
You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.
You can find more information on Wikipedia.
Don’t get me wrong, I am still lovin’ the WordPress and this blog will continue to be updated with longer (and hopefully more thought out) posts. But the stream of consciousness posts are best suited for the tumblelog.
Hopefully, this will be a better use of my time and yours!
View the Tumblelog
Subscribe to the RSS Feed
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December 31st, 2007

Don’t be everything to everyone. This is important to remember for people, businesses and in this case, software. Have an opinion. Be loved and hated. Be a strong brand.
This interview/discussion between Walt Mossberg (Wall Street Journal: Technology) and Jason Fried (37signals) covers a lot of good points. And many of them apply to much more than software development. It is worth watching even if you couldn’t care less about software.
A few takeaways:
- It is good to say no. Helps keep your idea/product/business simple.
- WWSJD - What Would Steve Jobs Do? Probably say no. This had helped lead to Apple’s success.
- A company should have an opinion.
- Being hated & loved is better than being (UMA) universally moderately appealing (I just created a new acronym).
- Consider your customer’s experience first. Open source projects often fail, in the consumer market, because the customer experience is not considered first. Open source software is built from the code out, instead of the interface in.
- Leaders make great decisions, not groups.
Watch the interview here.
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November 13th, 2007