Absolutely GOLDEN Quote
Where Visual Design Meets Usability - An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part II
"It’s also very valuable to look at the visual design from the perspective of what is absolutely necessary to communicate. Do you really need a different background, font size, font color, and drop shadow to distinguish that content? Would just a background color suffice? A common tendency I see is over designing, such as employing too many different colors and too many different graphic elements, which ultimately result in visual noise or just design-for-design’s sake."
That speaks to the core of the way I look at the web.
(yes, I'll read the whole article eventually. I collect those and the HFI newsletters and read them in one big Usability blur)
(I'm slowly pulling in some old posts from my blog @ raizlabs.)