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Simple Ways To Help Your Design Suck Less (jimwhimpey.com)
7 points by danw on Oct 14, 2007 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments


That site looks awfully dark and gray to me.


Seems to go for arty over readable.


The liberal sprinkling of the word "always" makes me rather wary. It's easy to just take it as "the way to do it", and don't know why, especially as a programmer like myself. When things change later on, it's easy to end up being one of those that just do it because you've been told to do it that way.

The general spirit of the article is spot on though. I liked the suggestion to try using line height or spacing to differentiate headings from body, rather than just to bold everything just because that's the browser default. The idea of alignment points is something I knew implicitly, but never thought about specifically. I think there's a book called Grid Systems that discusses this.

The idea of web design is to communicate what is important vs what isn't (as an easy over-generalization). You can use any number of techniques to achieve that. This is a good start, I think.


Only the header shows up in Opera. Maybe he's a good designer, but it doesn't matter if he can't make his site show up in a standards-compliant browser...


Ug. Not a very good example of design. The letter spacing of the subtitles is so large that you practically have to spell them out.


I've seen a lot of instances recently where some of the worst design (at least to my _untrained_ eye) is on sites promoting good design.


Sad but true. Most of the time, that comes from people forgetting that good design subsumes usability. If a design doesn't score high marks on usability, it's a bad design, irrespective of how it looks.





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