Lessons from the Chewbacca Incident

Lessons from the Chewbacca Incident:

This article recaps the flood of traffic to Michael Heilemann's article, "George Lucas Stole Chewbacca, But It's Okay".

But in my mind, the real lesson to be learned here is that Michael's follow-up article is a textbook example of design, markup, and communication in a single page. Note how negative space, prominence, and color create good visual hierarchy for the layout of the page (headline, graph, body text). The graph is not only compelling but also interactive, and it's rendered entirely in SVG. The copy is engaging and uses column-count to format the text in two columns (WebKit only).

Hat tip to Daring Fireball, whose dominance in sending traffic to sites clearly justifies its weekly $5,000 sponsorship fee.