Hierarchy. Strong, consistent visual hierarchy is key to a quality design.Q : What is visual hierarchy?A : Important elements have the most emphasis. Least important elements have the least emphasis. So, a user’s eye should move around the page from your most important content to your least important content.Q : Ok…I still don’t understand. How do you measure the emphasis of a single design element?A : There are a couple of design principles that we can use to create more or less emphasis.

Hierarchy - Design’s pecking order - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

The folks at 37 signals use a persistent message at the top of Backpack pages to alert users to new features (in the example below, the message is used to announce their affiliate program)

blink design library: Persistent Message

Wells Fargo hired Pentagram in the fall of 2005 to begin work on a new user interface for their ATMs. Wells Fargo was in the process of upgrading their ATMs with touchscreen monitors. This was a relatively slow process, since there are about 7,000 ATMs in the field, and any upgrades are expensive. But with the vast majority to be converted during 2007, this was the perfect time to create a fresh UI that would fully utilize the touchscreen capability.

That design is money! - physical interface

The folks at Y!DN have released Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit 1.0, which contains a full set of stencils that cover Web components in various states

Ajaxian » Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit 1.0

I saw the enclosed dialogue box on a colleague’s PC and thought that you might find it amusing.

[Screens Around Town] Nivea, Newsweek, and “Yes to All” - (37signals)

The idea would be that a simple application would pull headlines from the BBC News website, or any website, and seperate the headline into individual words. It would then check a database to see if there is a pictogram associated with that word and display it. This would loop for all words until the headline is complete. If there is no pictogram for the word available, then it will just display the word and update an online list that symbols for word ‘X’ are needed.

Outdoor pictogram headlines // Designing The News