Tools and principles that should live in every designer's utility belt
White space: allow content (and your visitors' eyes) to breathe.
Charts, borders and graphic planes: segmentation of information into visual categories.
An intuitive search method: allows your users to jump directly to the information they need.
Grids: Although not always necessary for understanding, keeping content within a rigid and consistent structure helps reduce the effort required to process it.
Strong Information Hierarchy - Establish a consistent design language using content types (blurs, excerpts, calls to action).
Visual hierarchy: The relative importance of different content areas and elements can be implied visually in many ways, from typographic treatments (headings, subtitles, quotation marks, etc.) to image sizes and saturation, placement, etc.
