I think some of the characteristics described in the reading were a bit obvious, but for the most part I thought the reading was helpful. I thought the pages we looked at in class were more helpful in me getting an understanding of some really important simple tricks to good page design. Sitting in class with everyone throwing out ideas made it easier for me to get a grasp on the most important techniques and what you can and can't let go. I think the things like contrast which are easier to recognize are easily avoided, and other aspects of page like alignment are those subtle things that are easily missed. Thing that I have come to despise and recognize is bad spacing on a page be it stories to pictures, pictures to captions, or advertisements to the rest of the page, spacing, or bad spacing I should say, is something that can ruin your page design wise quickly.