Design is in the Details

May 2, 2008

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 (no longer available)
• 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