Jeffrey Zeldman:

When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this.

Willfully choosing less in an age of abundance is a radical act.

The codebase on big sites isn’t impenetrable because developers slavishly followed arbitrary best practices. The codebase is broken because developers don’t talk to each other and don’t make style guides or pattern libraries. And they don’t do those things because the people who hire them force them to work faster instead of better. It starts at the top. (emphasis added)

I added that emphasis because I thought it was a great point. It’s easy to point the finger and say “well it’s not my fault the codebase is impenetrable” but as a professional software engineer it’s your job to communicate the value and importance of a codebase that is comprehendible. Zeldman continues:

Employers who value quality in CSS and markup will insist that their employees communicate, think through long-term implications, and document their work. Employers who see developers and designers as interchangeable commodities will hurry their workers along, resulting in bloated codebases that lead intelligent people to blame best practices instead of work processes.

Great perspective, in my opinion, on organizational structure and effects on code. It’s always talked about how John or Jane Doe developer impacted the codebase, but people outside of the engineering department have an effect too. And that impact is not often talked about (or even perceived).

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.