love this distinction between levels of design. truly higher level designs are designing solutions instead of features, outcomes instead of products. there's no function more important than this.
“Limit everything to the essential but do not remove the poetry.”
— Dieter Rams, quoted in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams
The Vignelli Canon outlines fundamental design principles, emphasizing semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics, along with the importance of discipline, appropriateness, and visual power for effective and timeless design practices.