Rules of Design

Knowing the rules of design will not making you a good designer -- but ignoring them makes it very easy to sacrifice truth for beauty and rendering a great disservice to your audience. The contents of this area are all based on experience, both in the breach and the observence.

I would like to see this grow into something similar to the Gang of Four's Design Patterns. While there are many design templates such as those you will find in the Yahoo UI Library (an incredible resource) what you don't see are the precepts used to build these elements; the causal relationships between design choices and design effects are a field that I would put midway between cognitive analysis and user interface: these are the Whys behind the Hows.