Now as you can see, especially on the left side menu, the links are pushed up almost directly under each other, there's barely a few pixels gap at all. Even worse, was the main article text, runs directly alongside the vertical border of the menu. The containers for the links are also very restrictive, the article heading/date/content all run into one another, with no visible gaps making it hard to distinguish between them. The extent of how cluttered the older design was can be showen even more if we map out where text is placed.


The current design has ample space on the left menu links, making them very easy to read, the article headings are placed well and the date/title is seperated from the main content. The header feels far less cramped with plenty of room around the logo, and where text is placed near a rounded corner, it is placed far more "evenly" giving it a clean and "roomy" feel. Although not pictured, the image/icons have 10-15px padding so the text doesn't run up against it as it used to. Lastly, the text line height is tweaked to provide some more space between each line of text, this makes it far easier to read as it allows the readers eyes to focus on a clearly defined line, rather than several lines running into each other.

This applies to things like table cells as well, the tiniest bit of padding can make so much difference, if you have applications or documents that have images/elements running along side text, just give a bit of white space some thought.