We've all seen the lights fade and the news reader collate the shuffled pages on the desk in front of them as the news finishes. It adds a realistic flavour to the show, a physical dimensions which is otherwise completely forgotten in the television experience. Moreover it adds a strong professionalism, portraying the clean, efficient and even ruthless facet to the news and its presentation.

However, we also all know that news readers actually read the information off a screen in front of them and those seemingly important pages are in fact blank. Yet we don't care because it looks good and realistic...

This demonstrates a point which I've recently found increasingly important - the little details. The pages randomly distributed in front of the news reader aren't necessary but accentuates the experience for the reader. We see this in film all the time - the better directors bring all the little details however big a scene is. They make sure the accent of the extra for that single shout is perfect, there aren't any objects which don't fit with the time of the piece, the text on that discarded board is in the correct language and so on. The results are definitely noteworthy, whilst films may boast massive spectacles, if they are lacking in the tiny details, the piece really loses its force for both the general audience and critics.

So what can we designers learn from such a well-worked practice? We should consider those mini bugs which appear to scuttle across the framework of our minds, like where you place those links, how the colours fit in with the rest of the site, etc... You might have the general shape, but if the final mass of your work forms a cube rather than a smoothly finished sphere, how are you ever going to get the ball rolling?