Here are some memorable points from Dan Rubin and Bryan Veloso’s talk, Design is in the Details from Webmaster Jam 2007, get MP3 of talk from RSS feed. I listened to this talk over my Christmas vacation. I listened to it again this morning. I had immediately applied several of the things they talked about to my personal site and have integrated into my design process.

  • Let your layout breathe - CNN.com is a great example
  • Consistency of spacing or use multiple scale
  • Use range kerning in headlines (with larger font size)
  • No hanging widows - Shaun Inman’s Widot plugin
  • Alignment - aligning elements can make a huge difference
  • Black is not black and white is not white - consider using #333 or #CCC instead of default black and white
  • Flat is boring - create some depth
  • Adding a pixel to add interest - as one border (they used example of Mint’s dashboard)
  • Know when to quit