Subcide

Following in the footsteps of Khoi and Shaun Inman, here's my introspective on 5 common elements that define my style:

Setting aside whether the aesthetic or style of my design is particularly original or not, I have a way of solving design problems that’s predictable, at least. For better or worse, there are certain tropes, tendencies, tricks and clichés that I repeatedly enlist in the pursuit of a design solution. I thought to myself the other day, wouldn’t it be fun to list them all out?

Steve's five fallbacks

1. Consistant Font Sizing
   After lessons learned from the early days of Microtext and the more recent boom of ultra-gigantic text, I've settled on my own fairly good (i think) standard of 18px equivilent headings and 12px equivilent body text. This site is an exception, where I was playing with 14px text as an experiment. I also take this opportunity to apologise to everyone for using px sizing for text more often than not.
   
   
2. Padding
   If in doubt, add padding! A good 15px - 25px of padding between columns or elements works wonders for readability and general openness of a design.
   
   
3. Rounded Corners
   I have an unhealthy obsession with rounded corners. To the point that I'll create all my rounded corners in photoshop using inverted eliptical selections and the eraser tool, because I've never been satisfied with photoshop's antialiasing on its vector based rounded corners. They do make things look friendly though.
   
   
4. Buttons with Depth
   I strongly believe in guiding a users eye by adding depth to clickable buttons using shading. Unfortunately a lot of the time this comes out as the dreaded gel-buttons syndrome, but its something I'm trying to work on getting rid of.
   
   
5. Myriad Pro
   This is my life-saver font, much like Inman's FF Din, that I use whenever nothing else fits. It works for navs, headings, and text (but not web text), and has a lot of different variants. It replaced Helvetica as the font I over-use.

Now I feel vulnerable, like everyone knows my secrets :) Post your own to make me feel better.