Design Rules

By: Edited by Anna Muoio and Lucy A. McCauley |  10/1999

Everywhere you look today—from buildings and landscapes, to commercial products and public services, to Web sites and print products—design has taken on new meaning. Design isn't just about decoration; it's a critical component of how we communicate, collaborate, and compete. But behind the "look and feel" of any good design are a host of carefully conceived principles: fundamental propositions that define the essence of the design. The trick for all businesspeople today is to learn those underlying rules—to think like designers. With that in mind, Fast Company asked 15 top designers—creators of buildings, furniture, products, Web sites, costumes, and labels—to deconstruct something that exemplifies great design to them. More important, we asked them to tell us what we can learn about the art of design. Read their thoughts, and then take out a sketchbook and designing your own world.

Burkey Belser
President and Creative Director
Greenfield/Belser Ltd.
Washington, DC

Design is harder than people think, it requires rigor, courage and clear goals. Without a goal, design is just decoration. That might sound like a simple truism, but with a goal in mind the discipline of design becomes ordered. Every decision is reviewed and considered within the context of that goal.

Take, for example, Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Unlike traditional monuments, the Vietnam Memorial does not celebrate war or victory. How could it? But those who commissioned the design expected to get a monument. Instead, they got a memorial to the dead. It's probably no accident that Lin's design was originally submitted for her funerary-architecture class at Yale.

You can see how every design decision of that memorial—her choice of size, shape, and color, and the way she chose to organize the names—reflects and responds to her goal. Like an antimonument, the memorial cuts into the ground, and goes in the opposite direction than most monuments do. In keeping with her goal, she chose black marble, which absorbs light, rather than white marble, which reflects it. That choice really pulls the design together. Even the shape of the memorial speaks to her goal: It stands at about a 120-degree angle, which makes it look like a book of the dead that is permanently open and that is meant to be read. In Lin's organic vision, every design decision contributed to the whole. The cumulative effect: a tidal wave of sorrow. And the silence the memorial engenders is deafening.

Great design—whether it's of a product, a service, or an event—should give the viewer an epiphany of communication and understanding. It should astonish.

Burkey Belser (burkeyb@gbltd.com) is cofounder of Greenfield/Belser Ltd., a creative marketing-communications company for service businesses. In 1997, Belser won a Presidential Design Award for his design of Nutrition Facts, the nation's food-labeling system that appears on more than 6.5 billion products, from candy bars to tuna fish. The Vietnam Veteran's Memorial was dedicated in November 1982; in the public design competition for the memorial, Maya Lin's design was chosen from among a group of 1,421 submissions.