Sweating the small stuff

A lot of the stuff I discuss on this blog is a little anal retentive, I admit. Fiddly little alignments, spacing, matching up typefaces, more alignment, more futzing with spacing... Are those last few changes it worth it?

Seth Godin explains why it pays to sweat those last few details.

In most fields, there's an awful lot of work put into the last ten percent of quality. ...

Laying out the design of a page or a flyer so it looks like a pro did it takes about ten times as much work as merely using the template Microsoft builds in for free, and the message is almost the same...

Except it’s not. Of course not. The message is not the same.

The last ten percent is the signal we look for, the way we communicate care and expertise and professionalism.

This is why I write about using Helvetica instead of Arial, and anything instead of PowerPoint.