Dieter Rams Poster

7 min readFeb 17, 2021

Design Hero Part 1

Prompt: Design an informational poster for someone who knows nothing about your design hero.

Key points:

gather, curate and craft text, images and typography that best tell the story of your hero and their work.
make a poster that both delights and resonates with your audience, while also informing and educating them

Picking a design hero

I was choosing between Milton Glaser and Dieter Rams for my deign hero. I ultimately decided on Dieter Rams because his design philosophy “less, but better” really resonate with me, and I want to learn more about him.

Mood board

To help me later on designing my poster, I made a mood board of Dieter Ram’s notable works, typefaces associated with him, and colors he liked to use in his designs. The key words to describe his designs are restrained, minimalist, puritan, functional, and harmonious.

Thumbnail Sketches

Some preliminary thumbnail sketches of compositions I want to explore. I was mainly thinking of how to emulate Dieter’s work in my poster. Some ideas I had was creating a gallery of his works with grids resembling his shelf-system, using his signature dial as a timeline, using justified paragraphs to imitate his stereo’s perfectly aligned lines, and using the composition of the whole poster to emulate the proportions of his TP1 radio.

Another consideration I had was his design philosophy “less, but better”. I wanted to make a poster that corresponds to that philosophy, perhaps through its cleanliness and organization.

Digital Sketches

I took some of my thumbnail sketches into digital, because I wanted to see how they would look with actual photographs. I quite liked how some of these turned out in terms of how clean they looked. But it still feels like I’m missing something here.

Feedback from class (GENERAL):

Extract/Synthesize what they do in their work into poster. Do not copy. Can be something subtle. (ex. how I turned dial into timeline)
Refinement: iterations on a theme. Making details better. Make everything work together
What is the story you want to tell about them/their work?

Feedback from class (MY WORK):

dial as timeline works great
using the contrast of positive (images, text) and negative space. Having “less, but better” in the negative space to emphasize message?
interestingly cropped images of his designs work better than photography of the whole work (ex. 2nd poster)
Posters only get one chance to show viewers everything. My digital sketches work better together as pages in a book, but individually they’re not engaging (visually interesting) enough. Need to make viewers linger for longer
Get more of his work in there. They look work together like puzzle pieces, and show off his style. His body of work creates harmony together. Show how prolific he is. The humor between “less, but better” and how much he’s done. My main challenges for this poster: how to show a lot of his work? How to curate and show the relationship between his work?
Don’t be scared to put in a lot of stuff. Dieter’s designs actually have a lot in there, but they look minimalist because they’re so well-organized.
Have 1 general direction by next Thursday

Back to sketching

Based on feedback, I did some more thumbnail explorations. Putting in more examples of Rams’ work while incorporating the dial element is hard. So I wanted try to reflect the circle in a radial composition. A key question is how to show a lot of his work without overwhelming the viewer with information? In other words, how do I establish hierarchy?

Digital Sketches

Trying out my thumbnails in digital, I found that the last one is the most versatile in terms of image placement. I can also integrate the timeline element better in that one.

Iterations

I cleaned up the composition better and made two iterations. They are not there yet, but a pretty big step from where I came from. But I feel that these may be a bit dull and not very exciting to look at. Maybe the issue lies with the monochromatic color scheme?

Feedback from class (2/25):

“less but better” quote doesn’t make sense in context
the placement of “Dieter Rams” makes the composition really different (first one feels full while second one feels emptier). People are more drawn to first one
the whole composition feels a bit full. It doesn’t have many breaks/ places to allow viewers to breathe. Eye goes to the negative spaces. Try taking away all squares and slowly building necessary ones back in.
paragraph doesn’t look centered. Feels awkward because it’s not aligned to anything. Has too little negative space
opacity makes you not want to look at those images. Try exploring version without opacity?
color: play with varying amounts of the red. See how far you can push it

Feedback from Brett:

Everything is talking at the same volume. Everything inside full grid makes it monotonous and tiring to look at.
Need to break the grid. Run off the page. Let the images be free and speak for themselves. Let the viewer appreciate the forms of the product.
Explore composition with more organic placement of images.
Don’t use opacity. It mutes the beauty of his works.
timeline element is good with pop of color. Can be smaller and more tightened up
hard to do justified text with narrow type box.

Iterations II

I like the left one more because I think it moves the eye around the page better and makes for a more playful/interesting composition. But I’m going to keep exploring both versions.

Brett’s feedback:

Version A (left)

Portrait can be bigger. Maybe it can somehow interact with the name? Pixelation problem can be solved by messing around with the image more in Photoshop (try bit-map?)
Get more products in there. Can bring down the scale of them.
Timeline needs more elements. Consider how the increments relate to actual gap in years.

Version B (right)

timeline can be more elegant and precise, like Dieter’s work. Right now it looks clunky and a bit random
Integrate name more with paragraph
Add tiny captions to product to refer back to timeline?

Reflection:

I really tend be scared to crowd the composition so I end up with a lot of empty spaces. I need to push myself more to put in more things.

Iterations III

This is what I showed in class on Tuesday.

What I changed:

VA: putting in more works. Filling up the timeline more. Played around with headline (creating a “cross” with the timeline). I spaced the letters apart more to imitate the timeline and create an “expansion” effect.

VB: organized the timeline better to look more elegant. Made my text block justified to fit in with Dieter’s work. Added a gradient to help move the eye vertically.

Apart from a few smaller problems I have to fix, the two designs are pretty much set. I had to pick one to fine-tune for my final. I like aesthetics of version A better, but version B has a more interesting and bolder composition in addition to a narrative. So I decided to go with version B.

After meeting with Jaclyn, I took her suggestion of moving my text block into the top, along with all the other products. It fit well there due to the justified paragraph. This allowed me to clear the bottom of the composition more to emphasize the quote “less, but better.”