Design Rules

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 (bbelser@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 Veterans 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.

Katherine & Michael McCoy

Senior lecturers at the Institute of Design
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, Illinois

Every now and then, a design comes along that radically changes the way we think about a particular object. Case in point: the iMac. Suddenly, a computer is no longer an anonymous box. It is a sculpture, an object of desire, something that you look at.

A friend of ours recently bought an iMac for one reason: It looks good on her kitchen table from every angle. Gone is the tangle of wires spilling out of the back. Instead, you see the computer's clean, curved, and attractive backside. Its translucence celebrates those inscrutable internal components that most of us think of as black magic. Like the new Volkswagen Beetle, there's something witty about the iMac's shape and selection of colors. And it's sensual: Its rounded form nods to nature and the organic world.

But what really makes the iMac so successful is that its form is just one part of an integrated experience. Every element -- from the packaging to the advertising to the user interface -- contributes to the buyer's overall perception. The iMac's packaging, for example, continues the visual language that Apple began with its Macintosh boxes: a large, clear typeface surrounded by generous white space. The visual identity is direct and elegant, while making the product seem friendly and accessible to nonexperts. Those qualities are extended to the advertising, which features seductive product photographs -- a spectrumatic "flower" of colorful iMacs on a clear white space. The brilliance of Apple's design: They understood that a computer, like many consumer products, can be an object of lust.

Katherine (katherine.mccoy@highgrounddesign.com) and Michael (Michael.mccoy@highgrounddesign.com) McCoy were directors of design at Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, for 23 years. Katherine's current projects include signage for the Chicago Bears headquarters. Michael is a founding partner of Fahnstrom/ McCoy Design Consultants in Chicago, designers of the "Bulldog Chair" for Knoll. The iMac, with its 333-MHz processor, comes in five delicious flavors: strawberry, blueberry, grape, tangerine, and lime.

Davin Stowel

Founder and president
Smart Design
New York, New York

We interact with design on two levels: the physical and the emotional. We have a word for the physical part: ergonomics -- what feels good to you. I call the emotional level "psychonomics" -- what makes you feel good. The baseline of good design is a perfect balance of the two.

It's said that form follows function. I disagree. Form is function. The two are developed together and are intertwined. In a truly great design -- a design that stands the test of time -- that is done as efficiently as possible. A great design has nothing more than it needs to do the job. Charles and Ray Eames's molded-plywood chair of the 1940s is a perfect example. They molded the wood into flexible shapes that perfectly conform to your body and absorb shock when you move.

In many ways, Herman Miller's Aeron chair is descended from that Eames chair. But the Aeron is more about performance, because it's about action, movement, and mobility: It's like the Indy car of chairs. But like the Eames chair, the Aeron is pared down mechanically to exactly what's necessary. And the designers showed tremendous inventiveness when they crafted Aeron's cushion, which uses the least amount of material needed to achieve comfort.

And that is the real art and skill of a designer: to achieve elegance in design with the highest degree of efficiency.

Davin Stowell (davin@smartnyc.com) founded Smart Design, a product-development firm, 19 years ago. Smart Design is responsible for Oxo International's Good Grips kitchen tools, which have won numerous design awards and are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.