Although I'm an engineer and not a designer, I think it's fair to point out that this is article is primarily about visual design, which is only one aspect of t

Although I'm an engineer and not a designer, I think it's fair to point out that this is article is primarily about visual design, which is only one aspect of the design of the overall user experience. There's a phrase I've heard, "information architecture", which roughly seems to mean "how the layout and presentation help the user process the information being presented". With this in mind, I think a lot of folks (both designers and engineers) conflate the two sometimes. Another thing: I suspect that information-dense visuals are sort of like highly-performant software: hard to design, harder to implement, and much harder to change once you've gone to all the trouble of squeezing out every possible optimization. As advice for beginners, it seems fine to say "add more negative space", just like we tell junior engineers to "avoid premature optimization", because the ability to recognize when those optimizations are needed goes hand-in-hand with the ability to actually do them right.