Dieter Rams spent decades at Braun making things that looked exactly like what they were. Radios, clocks, shavers, speakers. Nothing extra, but somehow absolutely essential.
Everything considered. It’s a design language so consistent that you can recognize a Braun product from across a room without seeing the logo.
Chinese digital artists Lu Yan (aka elliot9) and Zhiyi Zhang took that language and asked a simple question: what if Rams had designed your system icons?
The result is Rams System Icons, a set of hyper-realistic 3D icons that feel like they were pulled from a Braun catalog that never existed. Cameras, calculators, fans, lamps, radios, watches.
Even contemporary devices like VR headsets and MP3 players get the treatment. The surfaces are soft grey, the corners are rounded just so, and small hits of orange or blue do the work that ornamentation would ruin.
What makes the project land is the restraint. It would have been easy to lean into nostalgia or turn it into pastiche.
Instead it reads as a genuine extension of Rams’ thinking into a context he never touched. The icons feel useful. They feel considered. They feel like they belong together.
You can see the full series on Behance.
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