A decent, introductory write-up about white space. It's a bit difficult to take seriously since the design of the blog doesn't use whitespace effectively. Of course, "The shoemaker's children are often shoeless", and all that.

Irrelevant aside: 'dogsfurry' can work. As someone who spends a lot of time with marketing firms and branding agencies, dogsfurry is not an inconceivable label for a high-end pet supplies company.

> the design of the blog doesn't use whitespace effectively.

Could you be more specific? My blog definitely needs a design refresh (your quote is right – I've been writing a book the past year so haven't had the time to design), but I'm sure you don't mean that the entire blog design fails to use white space effectively :)

First off, thanks for writing Design for Hackers.

What distracted me when I was reading this post is that many parts of the page appear to be improperly aligned: http://i.imgur.com/77bVj.png

I found the site jarring in general. The bright yellow hurt my eyes, and the babyshit brown type seemed out of place given that it was used only in the intro and first headline, and didn't fit in with the other colours there. The yellow was the biggest pain for me, however.

Also, a little more padding around the text might look better. It's a little cramped.

I could hardly believe that the author of the book designed that blog.. I mean, who would like to buy a book about design with such an ugly look and feel and 1990 taste. Ironically, even the white spaces are wrong :-/ IMO, it's way better to keep things simple and avoid ugly graphics and colors if you're not good enough to use them correctly.

Weirdly, with the table designs, he switches to using italics for the %s without discussion.

I assume that's because, in the absence of a dividing line, it provides an additional hint that the two blocks are separate? That seems to weaken his point about the importance white space for this example, though...

This post is based upon a part of my book, in which I do mention the italics, but I left it out on the first run. I've now edited to post so I do mention it. Thanks for noticing / commenting!

http://illusion.scene360.com/wp-content/themes/sahara-10/sub... this is why negative space is important. It can create unintended things if you are not aware that it exists.

I don't really get how "1+1=3" is related here. With a proper grammar, such as the one used in infix arithmetic, whitespace is unnecessary. (and missing deliminators in postfix or prefix for 1+1 wouldn't yield three, just an error, or 11 if there's a unary + operator defined.

For a website that is concerned with design matters, it is odd that it uses @font-face typeface that makes it virtually unreadable on Windows.

http://i51.tinypic.com/1jusfs.png

I'm not sure what part of that screenshot is supposed to be unreadable?