Care to explain why one is better than the other? I opened both in new tabs, and it took me a while to figure out which was your before and which was the after.

Moving the camel up makes the top line up better, but the rest of the changes seem pretty arbitrary (to my zero-design-sense eye). What are the improvements, and why are they better?

Here's a subset of the vertical alignment points in the first, and the ones they're replaced with in the second:

http://img.skitch.com/20100706-dcay3gni71sbq8da6meas97898.pn...

http://img.skitch.com/20100706-q3hw63fswsfapwx71pdkm4x4sc.pn...

It's still far from ideal, but is working in the general direction of laying things out in a grid. The other in-the-direction-of-gridiness shift is in making the margins between elements more consistent.

I don't know enough about the psychology of design to know why grid-like layouts are more appealing to some people. To me, when looking at a design, the use or mishandling of implied geometry in a design jumps out at me immediately, but I'm also the sort of guy that measures distance on walls before hanging pictures to make sure that they're at symetrical places on the wall. ;-)

I guess I'm alone in this, but I find page and window layouts built around a strict grid really strange looking. They look blocky and mechanical; full of rivers of space not unlike like poorly typeset text.

I find that space can help move the eye and accent parts of a layout. The grid and blocking are important, but at the same time they're also something to deviate from.