5/1/15 Episode 223: Ten Principles of Good Design

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It’s time for another Drive to Work.

So let me start by explaining that I have a cold. And so I do not want you to fall in love with my melodic deep voice, it is not permanent. My wife has been saying that I sound a lot like the announcer that does the movies. “In a world where dragons rule as warlords…” But anyway, my voice sounds a little different because I have a cold. But I must carry on! I still have to drive to work. So you guys still get a podcast.

Okay. So today in a previous podcast, I brought up Brian Tinsman, back when he worked at Wizards, was trying to make us all better designers. And so one of the things he did is he put together a group of designers, and once a week we would get together, and we would take turns pitching something about design. Anything we wanted. And there were, I don't know, ten or so designers. So once every ten or so weeks you would give a presentation.

And the very first presentation I gave was called “The Ten Principles of Good Design.” So these were written by a German industrial designer named Dieter Rams. He’s probably most famous—so he works for the company Braun, he made lamps and radios and stuff like that. He’s probably most famous for being a giant influence on a man named Jonathan Ive. Jonathan Ive is the industrial designer for Apple.

So a lot of the work that Dieter Rams has done has had a big influence on Jonathan Ive. So when I did the article on him [NLH—Part One, Part Two] the original Braun stuff that Dieter Rams had done, and then some of the work of Jonathan Ive, and there’s a lot of influence, you can see it. So anyway, if you have used any Apple products, you have been influenced by the designs of Dieter Rams.

So the reason I brought this up was, someone, somewhere I saw use the ten designs, and now be aware, this was written by an industrial designer. He ran the Functional School of Industrial Design. That he definitely had a very distinct way of looking at it. But he was talking about industrial design. And you look at these rules, and like, he might as well be talking about game design. Or Magic design. These rules directly apply.

So what I said is, design is design. That’s kind of my point, was that design is—there’s a constant to design. That designing a lamp and designing a game aren’t as different as you would think. Both can illuminate. Okay. So I’m going to go through his ten principles today and talk about how they apply to Magic design. Or really, game design in general.

Okay. Now, principle number one. Good design is innovative. So this one’s pretty straightforward. That part of designing is not just merely doing what is done before. One of my roles as Head Designer is I want to constantly be pushing us to improve. To get better. To go to spaces and do things we haven’t done before. Now, once again, I stress this a lot, being innovative doesn’t mean doing things that haven’t been done for the sake of doing them, it means discovering new problems to solve and being open to finding new solutions you haven’t used before.

And that’s very, very important. For example, I didn’t start Innistrad design going, “How would I do double-faced cards? What kind of set could I do?” No, I was trying to solve a problem, which was werewolves, or dark transformation in general, and that ended up being the best solution.

So a lot of good design is innovative in the sense that it’s always looking for the best answer. But it is not seeking out answers, I always say, “Before you look outside the box, look inside the box.” Being innovative is not always doing something different. I think people confuse innovation with novelty.

There’s novelty in innovation, but what innovation is, innovation is figuring out the best way to execute on something even if the best way to execute on it is not something that’s already been done. Innovation is finding new ways to support things that are natural to the process. When you say you’re being innovative, this means you’re looking to explore and always challenge yourself to find the better way to do something. Innovation is about improving the process. It is not about box-checking. It is not about finding what hasn’t been done.

And like I said, there’s a thin line. I know there’s a lot of attraction to novelty, and every Magic set wants to have some novelty. Every game wants to have some novelty. But the novelty has to come from the game. The novelty has to come from what the game’s trying to do. That you, if you don’t earn your novelty, if you don’t earn your innovation, it will ring false.

And so you have to make sure that whatever you’re doing, the key to innovation is to figuring out what you are doing, and figure out the best tools to do that. And a true innovator doesn’t restrict themselves to only tools they’ve used before, but it also doesn’t exclude tools they’ve used before. A lot of innovation comes from using your tools in a new way. Or taking something you’ve done and presenting it in a new way. Innovation is not necessarily crazy out-of-the-box. A lot of innovations are small, tiny, incremental changes, but that those small incremental changes over time mean all the difference.

Okay. Number two. Now, principle number two. Good design makes a product useful. So one of the things—now, if you’re making lamps for a living, it’s pretty obvious. You want to make sure your lamps light up the room. But that applies to game design.

You are trying to make sure that what you are making—so one of the things that happens all the time is, there’s a difference between what looks good on the page and what plays good. And I know there is this big draw to make things that will make other people, when they look at it, get excited. But our job as game designers is not to excite people on impression as much as it’s excite them while playing the game. And so one of the things that’s very important is, not just to the first two seconds of looking at this, will it surprise you or excite you, it’s when you actually use this for what it’s intended, and in the game that’s playing the game, is it fun? Is there depth? Is it replayable?

That one of the things I want to do is I make sure I make stuff that doesn’t just excite you when you see it, it excites you when you’re playing it. That it opens up opportunity. And sometimes we have to err on the side of things that play well vs. things that seem exciting.

Recently, for example, we introduced megamorph for Dragons of Tarkir. So it was a mechanic where we tweaked an old mechanic. And on the surface, it seemed like a very little tweak. It seemed like, oh, that’s it? That’s all? But when you actually play with it, it’s a bigger thing than you realize. A lot of the best design is there’s just, it seems small and incremental on the surface, but when you play with it you realize, oh, those small incremental decisions make for good gameplay. And it’s not as small or incremental as you think when you actually start playing with it.

And that’s one of the things that’s definitely important is, you are trying to make a fun game. You can never forget that while making a game, people have to play it and enjoy what they’re doing. You are making something that people are supposed to be able to use, and the designer should never forget the end use. Who is using it? What are they supposed to be doing with it?

I mean, for example Dieter Rams makes a lamp, he’s like, “Well, someone’s got to read with this lamp.” We make a game, I’m like, someone’s got to play this game, many many times, and I want to make sure there’s depth of play. I want to make sure that they’re having fun. That they can build decks. That they can do all the things that Magic does.

I want a good draft experience. I want a good Constructed, casual Constructed, Standard Constructed, all the different things that people can do with Magic cards, I’ve got to make sure that every single product do those things. And that is really crucial. Crucial that when I’m designing, I’m thinking about the end user and how it will be used.

Okay. Principle number three. Good design is aesthetic. If you’ve ever any of my writing, I’m big on aesthetics. So the idea of aesthetics, for those that haven’t heard me do this spiel, is there’s certain qualities that are hard-wired into the human brain. They’re just—I took an aesthetics class in college.

And one of the things you learn is, like beauty is subjective. That’s what you’re told.  Everybody has different ideas of what beauty is, and so beauty’s completely subjective. And then aesthetics comes along and says, “Well, that’s not completely true.” The human brain is wired to appreciate certain things.

For example, symmetry. The brain loves symmetry. So a lot of what is traditionally beautiful has to do with being symmetrical. The brain loves patterns and patter completion, and all sorts of things that are just important because it’s something that tickles the human brain and makes it happy.

When you are designing, you have to be conscious of the aesthetics. The aesthetics matter. And a lot of people think like the little tiny details don’t matter, because well, whatever, it’s the big picture, like, no no no. All those little things, all the aesthetics we build in, will dictate whether a product feels right or doesn’t feel right.

That the aesthetic are, they’re not something that people necessarily pick up on consciously all the time, but they really pick up on them subconsciously. And it will irk you. And if you don’t follow aesthetics—now, every once in a while, development has to sort of move off the aesthetic ideals to make it balanced for gameplay. That has to happen, it’s a game, it’s a game first and foremost. But I do try in the design to make sure that we have the aesthetics that match to it.

One of these days maybe I’ll do an entire podcast on aesthetics. The big thing of aesthetics is understanding what people like and what makes the product—like, you can tell when a product is well done. Like one of the things that makes me feel good about Magic is when there are fake leaks, meaning other people pretend there’s cards that aren’t real cards, that they’ve made up and pretend like, “Oh, it’s a leak of a Magic set,” but they’re fake.

That a lot of the audience can look at the cards and go, “Oh, these don’t feel right. These aren’t real.” And that quality of having them feel right, that there’s a sense to what Magic is, and Magic cards have just a distinctive quality and feel to them. That’s an important part of aesthetics.

Like I said, there’s lots of different pieces about it. The important thing to understand is that if you want to be a designer, you need—aesthetics are something you have to actually study. In school I studied it. In fact, I went to Communications school, they required us to take a class on aesthetics. It was required.

And the reason is, if you’re going to communicate with people, if you’re going to try to use mass communications of any kind, games is one form—or really, art of any kind, you have to understand how people are going to perceive it.

One of the big things that I’ve been big on is, a lot of people like to start from the side of, what I’m doing. How am I making the thing I’m making? And one of the big things I brought to R&D in general is, you also have to think about, how is your end user receiving it? I can think about what I’m doing for my purposes, but if I never think about my end user and how they’re going to perceive it, I’m going to be not optimizing my product. I talked before about how principle two is it has to be useful, principle three is it has to be aesthetic. Those are both end user things. I want the end user to be able to use it to the best of their ability, and for it to feel right for them. That is why the aesthetic is so important.

Okay. Principle number four. It helps us understand the product. So part of design is education. That when you make something, you are also trying to make sure that the user understands how to use it. Now, I joke a lot when I talk about how game design in some ways is different in that sometimes you’re making a challenge for your audience to understand things.

But usually, not the rules, you want them to figure out how to solve the problem you’re giving them.  But the actual rules, you want people to pick up your game and know how to play. The basic fundamentals. The strategy they get to learn later, but the basic fundamentals of how to play. And a lot of decisions you make in game design, and I know we make in Magic, is am I making a choice that makes the person who is going to pick up have a better chance of playing it correctly?

And a lot of this is just figuring out, what do people think—I mean, there’s two ways to do it. One is, if I need to do something, how can I convey it so they can understand it? How can I show them examples, or how can I—like one of the classic examples was, we had made the Eldrazi in Rise of the Eldrazi. And the Eldrazi were these giant creatures, and they had this ability called annihilator that could destroy things when they attacked, and they were just crazy monsters.

And the problem we had was, we were playtesting, and a lot of less experienced players just weren’t attacking with them. And the way they were designed, you should just attack with them. They were giant monsters, annihilator was vicious, just you should attack with them. Like, how could we get them to attack with them? Like, they’re getting them out and then not doing the thing that they’re supposed to do with them.

And so one of the commons, we put “must attack.” And the reason we did that is, we knew that players would play with it, because it was a giant creature at common, we knew it would be one of the things they most often get, and once they got it out, it forced you to attack with it. And the reason it did is so you could learn, “Oh, wow, this thing’s really effective when I attack with it. I need to be attacking with these.” And it taught people.

So when you want to make your product educational, or make some understanding, you want A. make sure you’re teaching them how best to use it, and that you are following how the intuition will work, meaning you want to make a mechanic so it does what you think it will do.

Okay. Number five. A good design is unobtrusive. What that means is that you are trying not to draw attention to yourself. That a good design isn’t trying to be splashy, “Hey, look at me, I’m good design! Look at what I’m doing!” That is actually not—good design does what it does in a way that doesn’t force the player to have to sort of—just it should do what it wants to do.

That a good game should play and be fun, and it is not—your audience will appreciate you for the end product of what you’ve made. You don’t need to show off as a designer. You don’t need to say, “Hey, look at me, look what I can do.” That is bad design. Good design is the audience is invisible to the process of the design and it’s just becoming one with the end state. A good game, they’re enraptured in the game. They don’t need to know how the game got put together.

Now, I do all sorts of talks for people who care, behind the scenes, I’m transparent to explain it, but I don’t put that in my game. If you don’t want to understand what makes Magic tick, play it, don’t worry about it. You want to come to my column, okay, you’re coming to learn about game design, I’m going to talk about it.

But you want your game to just do what it needs to do and not—when you, the designer, use your time to demonstrate what you’re capable of, you are taking your ego, and you’re putting your ego above the good of the game. A good game, first and foremost, should be an experience of the game, it should not be a chance to observe the designer. That good design is not about the designer, good design is about design in the play. Good game design.

Okay. Principle number six. Good design is honest. And what that means is that you’re not trying to trick your audience. I mean, once again, in game design you’re trying to make challenges for your audience, and sometimes the challenges can be a little tricky. I’m not talking about that. What I mean is, you are trying to come across on what you’re doing.

One of the things we try in Magic very hard is, we’re making a trading card game. We want to be very honest with what we’re doing. We want to be—the reason we put rarity symbols and collector numbers, we do a lot of stuff on our own cards to make sure that you understand what they are and how many there are and what they do and we use keywords and reminder text and we have all the stuff to make sure that understand what exactly it is. That we want it crystal clear and transparent in what we are selling and what we are dong.

And we as a company, when we realized we were changing how we were making Standard work, we told you before the product that would be affected years later would be affected. That a lot of design is being honest with your audience and explaining everything that you know, so they know what they’re dealing with. Good design, the audience understands what is coming with what they are buying. And you want to be very open and honest with your consumer.

Okay. Good design is durable. You want—the way to think of this is, I could make cards that are splashy and fun, and the first time you play them make awesome experiences. But yeah, once you play it once, it’s not too exciting to play again.

Or I could make stuff that maybe isn’t as splashy, but you can play it forty, fifty, sixty, seventy times and it’s still fun. And that one of the things about good game design is you’re going for the long haul. We’re going for the long haul. I guess, to be fair, there’s some games that like, it’s splashy, it’s fun, you’ll play it twice and you’re never going to play it again. There’s room for games like that.

But I’m definitely in the camp that I’m going to make something that’s going to last a lifetime. I want to make something that you’re going to buy and take home and years later you can break this out and it will still be fun and still be something that you can play. That you really want—I think good design lasts the test of time. That Magic isn’t a flash in the pan. It’s a good-quality solid game that you can play for the rest of your life. That’s my goal, you can play it for the rest of your life.

Number eight. Good design is consequent to the last detail. So one of my favorite sayings is, it’s the details that make your audience fall in love with your game. I mean, you want good solid foundation, you want—all the pieces should be good, it should be built on solid ground, it should be built up doing awesome things.

But in the end—the heart is finicky, and the heart is—the thing that makes your audience fall in love is when you do something that they feel is just for them. When there’s some little tiny detail that they believe that no one else has seen, that they’re seeing. And that it speaks to them on some personal way.

That one of the things about—I think art on any level, not just games, but art, is that what makes somebody truly fall in love with something is it speaks to them on some level that feels very personal. And it is hard to do that in the big picture. It is hard to make the big details personal. I’m not saying you can’t, sometimes you can. But usually the thing that—like, people can learn to really like what you’re doing in the big picture.

But the heart wants what the heart wants, and that usually when people fall in love with something, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, if you will, is there’s just some tiny detail of perfection. Some little thing that you’ve done that just sings. That just speaks to them. And I’m a big believer that the details matter. That you have to—if you want to really commit to something, you can’t just do the big brush strokes. You’ve got to do the tiny brush strokes. You have to take your idea and run it all the way through.

And there’s a lot of things we do that I don't know if everybody gets. I’ve written articles like on Unglued, the Un-sets, where I’ve explained all the jokes fifteen years later, and people were like, “Wow, I didn’t see half of those jokes.” But somebody saw every single one. On Unhinged, somebody read the rules text on the box and realized that I was cracking jokes in the rules text on the box. The legal text on the box.

And that, I think that is why details are so important is, your player will obsess on everything. Your players will see the details. I’m not saying every player will see every detail, but some player will see every detail, and the details matter.

Okay, principle number five. Good design is concerned with the environment. Now, this means one of two things, I’m not sure what he meant. Number one, it could just be it’s eco-friendly. I know Magic is working towards that. Modern Masters we were playing around with some new packaging.

And anyway. The one I find more interesting, my second interpretation, which means you have to think of the environment in which your product is being used. If someone’s going to buy your lamp, where are they putting your lamp? How are they using your lamp? If someone’s going to buy their game, how are they using their game? Where are they using their game? With who are they using their game? How is a game getting used?

And that is pretty important. And one of the things about when you design a game is, you have to think about where and how it’s going to be used. And that’s why, for example, we’re very conscious of formats. Oh, well we’re working on a legendary card. Might this be a commander? How will they use this in Commander? Or using a card that’s more designed for draft. How are they going to draft it? Or I’m making a card for any of the psychographics, like how are they going to use it? That’s really important. How are they going to make use of it? What kind of things do I expect this to be in? What kind of deck will this card get played in?

That you have to think of the environment that each thing—you have to think of your end user, you have to think of the environment, you have to think of how each piece will be used. Because it’s important that you put that together, because that is going to be what’s going to determine how it gets played. And so when you’re designing it, you’ve got to think of the end state. Not just the end user, but how and where it’s going to be played.  

Okay. The final principle from Dieter Rams is good design is as little design as possible. So let me explain. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of work on the designer’s side, what that means is, what you want to do is do what you need to do with the least amount of design.

One of holy grails of design is, you want to get the most done with the least amount of design. That I think—one of the things that’s funny is, it takes a lot of design to take—like, every time you do design, every iteration you’re doing, one of the questions you’re asking yourself is, do I have too much? Is there something in the design that doesn’t need to be there?

And I talk about this a lot. If you can pull an element of the design and the design works, pull it, it doesn’t need it. The goal is not to pack as many things as possible into your design. The goal is to have the things you need to make it sing and nothing more.

And this is a hard one. Of all the rules, of all the principles that Dieter Rams is explaining here, this is the one that takes the most amount of time. For example, when I first started out as a designer, I would pack my designs like to the gills. To the gills. In fact, the Head Designer, when I would turn my files in, is like, “You have way too much stuff in here.”

And I was like, “Ohh, great, great! I have lots of stuff in there!” Or even when I watch designs of just young designers, when I’m able to look at stuff, when they turn stuff like the Great Designer Search and things like that, beginning designers so overstuff their cards. Like, I have so many good ideas I’ll put them all on one card.”

And the point is, your card should have one good idea. Not four, not five, not six. That you are not making the design better by cram-packing 8000 good designs in one card. Save those good designs for other cards. That part of what makes the design sing is it does the thing it’s supposed to do, it does it beautifully, and that’s what it does. And it is not the role of your design to try to do everything. The role of your design is to do the thing you need to do and do it cleanly and effectively without unnecessary complication.

Now that doesn’t mean, by the way, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have complexity if your thing needs complexity. But you shouldn’t have excess complexity. That you should have just enough complexity that it does what it needs to do, and not have more for the sake of having it. The goal of good design is not to make people do anything excess, that’s not necessary part of the design.

And this last one takes a while. It really does take a while for people to sort of embrace the idea that they don’t need to reinvent the wheel on everything they do. Like I said, early on, I just—I had so many ideas and I wanted to demonstrate every idea, and I felt like “Ooh, look how impressed people should be. Look how many ideas I have.”  And what I realized was, I was just breaking so many of these principles. The biggest one, it was I was just doing too much.

And one of the things I will say, if you are starting out, if you’re a game designer that’s beginning, I guarantee you’re breaking a lot of these rules. The thing I find very interesting about this is, it’s my twentieth year now doing Magic design, and how do I fare in these rules? I’m pretty good. I can be better. One of the things about doing this is I actually think about things. And I’m like, “Oh, wow, am I doing that?” As I explain the ideal. Am I meeting the ideal?

This is not something that like, you do, and then okay, got it. This is something you need to work with your entire career. These ten principles, have I perfected all of them? I have not. Am I better than I was twenty years ago? Absolutely. A big part of design is just learning through the process of doing is important.

And so I do think that—part of today’s lesson is, no matter what level game designer you are at, ask yourself, how could I be better at each of these ten things? And I guarantee, if you look deep, if you look really deep, you will discover that there is—and this is me as well, there are ways you could do better at these principles.

Okay. So I’m almost at work. So let me quickly recap. So the ten principles of good design by Dieter Rams. Number one, good design is innovative. As I say these, by the way, think about how you can be better at each of these. So number one. Good design is innovative. Number two, good design makes a product useful. Number three, good design is aesthetic. Number four, good design helps us understand the product. Number five, good design is unobtrusive. Number six, good design is honest. Number seven, good design is durable. Number eight, good design is consequent to the last detail. Number nine, good design is concerned with the environment. Number ten, good design is as little design as possible.

Your homework assignment, if you will, is seriously, like I said, when I first found this, I was on the internet and I saw this, and it really stood out to me. Like I said, I want to stress again, this guy, Dieter Rams, made lamps and radios, and he was making industrial things. But that when you pull back, the neat thing about design is there is a constant to design. That design definitely—there’s things that—humans are humans. And no matter what you are making for humans, there’s certain needs they have that you have to understand and you have to match.

And that part of being a designer—and this is an important part of it, a lot of this comes from here is, realizing that the purity of your design is more important than your function as the designer. And I can’t stress this enough. That if you want to be admired as a designer, make amazing things. That when you try to put too much of yourself in your design to the point of which it detracts from the design itself, it can be distracting.

That doesn’t mean you can’t personalize your design. It can’t mean it can’t speak of who you are. Obviously a good designer leaves an imprint. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be doing that. But you should be making choices in which your choices make your end design the best it can be. Not making choices that makes sure people realize it’s yours. Anyway. My big takeaway lesson of the day.

So like I said, this is—from time to time I like to do different kinds of talks, and so today was very game-designer-y. So hopefully you guys enjoyed that. I definitely think it was fun. I had a great deal when I originally did this talk, and then when I did this article, I got a lot of feedback people really liked it. Hoping people enjoyed the podcast as well.

But anyway, I am now parked in my parking spot. And so we all know what that means, it means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you guys next time.