I came across this pair of good articles articles by Rob Adams on UI design and presenting information to the end user while I was researching Flex development:
Designing for Flex - Designing Content Displays
Get Your Design Out of My Content
There are a lot of interesting ideas here that Rob put forth here, some adapted from Edward Tufte. The "every pixel on the screen" concept is something I have heard before when talking about traditional graphic design. Obviously, this doesn't mean you end up with a simple page of ASCII!! Rather, I think the idea here is to always push for unity and design that enhances rather than competes with your content. I like to think that ideal technology solutions are ones that always be strive for transparency, removing barriers to content in such a way that interaction with the application or tool in question simply becomes a natural extension of everyday activity.