Design tips

I found these chapters very helpful and truthful. As a designer for EmPRINT, I can honestly say that we follow a lot of the same rules when laying out an EmPRINT page as this book suggests for a Web page. Suggestions that the book made about alignment and proximity are rules that I often follow but never heard articulated or legitimized the way they were in this book. While I believe that no one should read the design suggestions in this book as commandments--set in stone, never to be broken--there are some tips that if you look at most newspapers, you'll notice there are some trends in 'professional' layout that consistently appear. There are always, however, good exceptions to the rules. For example, in chapter 8, we are cautioned against using all caps on a webpage, yet I've seen numerous webpages with art heads in all caps, and I don't find that bothersome.

Ultimately, while I think that these chapters layout some great groundrules that I needed to hear, it's important to be willing to break the rules on occasion, especially if you're breaking them for artistic purposes.