The Year In Design by Zeldman

90 percent of design is typography. And the other 90 percent is whitespace. Style is the servant of brand and content. Style without purpose is noise.

Rediscovering this with the renewed interest in speed, basic page structure semantics, JavaScript fatigue, etc.

One illustration or original photo beats 100 stock images.

With the ubiquity of people being online, they see everything across the Internet (especially the younger generation) so if you’re not unique, they’ll notice. If you’re bland, they’ll notice

Nobody waits. Speed is to today’s design what ornament was to yesterday’s.

This is an interesting observation. I feel like it puts into words this nagging feeling I’ve had the last few months: speed is design. On the web, speed is just as much a part of the design as the grid or typography. In many cases, I think some people would prefer the speed and simplicity of vanilla HTML markup over giant JavaScript apps when all they need to see or read is a few dozen lines of text.