[10feet]

> Why would you think a designer would have no justification for a change beyond “it looks nice”? What would you assume designers don’t understand issues like pixel alignment or designing for multiple devices? Why would you think designers would be raising these issues based on Photoshop mock-ups?

You are right, they often have good reason, and can make the case by explaining that. Of course, they often to not have a good reason beyond spacing, it looks better, it is too crowded, or it is not crowded enough.

[TheZenPsycho]

Isn't it unreasonable to expect that every design decision be based on logic? Human beings have two brain hemispheres. TWO WHOLE BRAIN HEMISPHERES. a right lobe and a left lobe. The right lobe is JUST AS BIG and complicated as the left lobe, in which our logic and reasoning abilities are based.

But in our culture, especially in development culture, for some reason any decision based on a process in the right hemisphere is valued far less. We call it "subjective" even though it isn't. It's the same processes that every human brain does in much the same way. This is why optical illusions can work. They work much the same way for every person, and the reasons they work are not based on logic. They're based on physical, biological processes in our visual processing systems. It's not a "logical" or "rational" process. It's a visual process.

But if a designer says that spacing is going to cause a problem, it's not valuable input because there is no "logical" reason behind it. That's not logical!

[carbocation]

All of these statements might be true, but they neither imply nor advance one another. They are all non sequiturs. Also, there is less to the left/right brain thing than most people seem to think.