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.
As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks,