this is important.

I'm currently battling this myself. Designing for the activities industry where a company offers different variations of tours and activities. It's hard to come up with a design solution once you exceed more than 5 activities. In a way, each activity needs to be a "baby web page" because it needs to contains the main info (price, date, description, photo, cta). One way I've come up to fight the "card" look is by having a plain card option (no borders/shadows) and that definitely helps lighten up the cognitive load and the distractions that could be caused by borders.

Anyhow, it's a well-written article.

"It works for Pinterest and Dribbble!" Does it? These are sites where the primary information is the image, yet most of the page's pixels are made out of everything but the images. Pinterest seems to have gotten a lot better recently. Dribbble on the other hand still clutters the screen with UI, rather embracing the images.

One of the best posts I've seen on DN in a while. Thanks for sharing this.

Love it... I tend to realize I made a mistake using cards when trying to scale a mobile design up to desktop.