This is entry three of a ten-part series based on Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design. The Journal asked writers and illustrators to contribute to the project. Each writer wrote on one of Rams’ principles; each illustrator reacted to a writer’s essay.

I believe this. Don’t you? You must, or you wouldn’t be reading this journal which, with its gray-on-gray scheme and boxy layout, resembles the aesthetic ideal to which Dieter Rams’ designs cleave. A functionalist might quibble with the lack of contrast. A minimalist might quibble with the bars. A modernist might wonder if the 1970s-style logotype wasn’t a little too much. But aesthetically it works: It sets a mood, and a different mood from other design blogs, despite the generalized preference for black, white and gray. Functionally, it works, too: the posts and parts are clearly identified and separated. The headlines are differentiated with just the sort of off-bright color Rams favored for his Braun calculators (look at the ‘equals’ button).

But there are thousands of other blogs that work equally well – maybe even better in terms of legibility, links and stickiness – but look terrible, junked up in the manner of the stereos, shavers and shelves that rivaled Rams’s designs with logos and lights, extraneous moving parts and homey/homely touches. Rams’s principles articulate the ideal of Good Design suggested by the Museum of Modern Art in its exhibitions of the 1940s and 1950s: paring away, smoothing out, reducing visual clutter to try to leave just the parts absolutely necessary to perform the task. The MoMA idea conflated aesthetics and functionalism but left out shoppers who didn’t happen to share the same aesthetic. Some people want their stereo to match their shelves, and not be white, either. Sometimes the paring away goes too far. I’ve written before about my Jasper Morrison coffee pot, which suffers the same staining as the cheap ones and doesn’t have a timer. It looks great but ultimately fails on my functional criteria.

On the flip side, there is the Congress for New Urbanism, which, in practice, fuses aesthetics and functionalism from the opposite side. The charter rightly suggests that development should stress walkable towns, minimized car presence, shared community spaces, open facades. It even says that individual architectural projects should transcend style. Yet, when New Urbanist projects are unveiled, their look is inevitably traditional. How does a gingerbread-trimmed porch function better than one with a concrete floor and steel pillars? It doesn’t, as long as its architect understands materials and proportion. The charter stresses function above all else, but, in reality, aesthetics creep in.

The conflation of aesthetics and functionalism on design’s right and left has led to a newly dominant (at least in the media) third way: social design. It is slightly shameful to admit you care deeply about how something looks. Instead, we care about its post-consumer content, its low price and third-world distribution channels, its health benefits, and so on. Social design goals should be added to the functionalist list. Once cradle-to-cradle is expected, we won’t need to talk about it any more. Then maybe we can acknowledge that aesthetics are subjective, but inevitable. There can be good design (lower case) without aesthetics, but if you believe in this principle, as I do, it can’t be great.

Alexandra Lange wrote on Rams’ third principle, Good design is aesthetic. Ms Lange is a journalist, critic, historian and teacher in the D-Crit program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Pavel Fuksa created the above illustration based on Ms Lange’s essay. Mr Fuksa is the Commercial Director at Rats Prague and freelance designer and illustrator.