[jasondemeuse]

> OP was talking about margins and padding etc which just are a lot less important than designers like to think

Are you just saying that or do you have evidence to back it up? I'm not a designer but I work closely with them and I'd say it's the exact opposite. Developers (myself included) tend to get tunnel vision on finishing functionality but the actual end users of the software care a lot more about the 'small things' like that than you're giving them credit for.

The fact that you say 'tweaking things 1px at a time' shows that you don't quite understand that it isn't about moving things around arbitrarily, it's about creating a design system that does it for you. Every header should have X amount of spacing between it and other elements, every paragraph should have the same size that makes sense with the headings it sits under, backgrounds should draw the users eye to important places, etc.

Using the old/new Reddit is a horrible example, because the old Reddit absolutely had a design system that made sense to the user. It might have been simple, but the spacing was consistent across every element. Watch the comments when a subreddit mod team updates their theme and small things like the padding around the comment preview is missing, it's the first thing that the users of the sub notice.

I've done a lot of end-user interviews, and actually paying attention to your padding/margins and making sure all of the elements fit your grid can be the difference between the user trusting your app because it looks professional, and giving up on it because it looks like a side project (or to use the Reddit example, the difference between using the home page and a half-baked custom sub theme).

HN might not be the demographic that you're going to get that feedback, but unless you're writing your software specifically for developers you're going to be losing a lot of trust regardless of how solid your software is behind the UI. It's not about creating 'art', it's about making your work look trustworthy to the end user.

[ux-app]

grids are great. nobody's arguing that a UI should be inconsistent, that is absurd. The vast majority of designers only attack the problem from a shallow aesthetic pov though.

>Using the old/new Reddit is a horrible example, because the old Reddit absolutely had a design system that made sense to the user.

Your own argument supports exactly what I'm saying. The designers of the new Reddit took an existing, very functional design and then f*cked it up by making it "pretty".

Most designers put UX on their resume (because it's trendy), but their folios betray that they do aesthetics (which is great, but not terribly important), and only have an effect on UX accidentally.