And we communicate through words, most of the time.
Typography is pretty important there. It certainly isn't the only skill that's necessary, but it's a great place to start and is often key to layout, especially in designs informed by the grid.
From a pure graphic design standpoint, I would recommend The Elements of Typography Style to any developer, as well as Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton. A solid understanding of typography is maybe the most important, and definitely the most immediately useful, facet of design.
Interesting point about Muller-Brockmann as well. It's essentially a collection of case studies about working within constraints.
I've got to disagree here. The whole point of FizzBuzz is that it's a straight-forward analytical problem that you should be able to do easily if you understand the fundamentals.
Annoying, and it will probably work. I've never followed anyone on instagram that I wasn't following on twitter, and if the option wasn't available I wouldn't have bothered.
You're right that a bunch of divs like this is non-semantic. Anyone who thinks otherwise is crazy.
As far as the classes goes though, I would recommend that you check out a style like OOCSS or SMACSS (which I prefer) and give it a shot on a project. I style almost everything with classes currently, and I've found it much easier to maintain and extend than the style that you're describing.
It's a personal choice obviously, but I think you should definitely give it a shot and see what you think.
This is really impressive, but I'm very hesitant. Obviously this html output won't be useful until you can modify tags, and as far as the CSS goes, this is not really ok:
Exactly. In my experience, it's far more common to not receive a letter at all. As disappointing as it is to receive a form rejection letter, not hearing anything is worse.
For server-side rendering there are two factors at play which have kept this from being an issue:
1. You're only getting the styles necessary to render the current page, which will often be smaller than an a global app CSS file.
2. Repeating styles (as in a long table) are repetitious and compress well with gzip.
Someone at Formidable has been doing some extensive research into this and should have a blog post out soon with more details.