I found the typography was too big, there were too many bold/italics/font sizes and the actual elements of what makes good design made me click in order to reveal what the elements are.
This website does the opposite of what two former fellow students did: In a seminar they held a talk about aesthetics in software development. At the beginning, they told us that they couldn't agree on what makes good aesthetics, so they simply designed their slides with the worst aesthetics they came up with.
However, their slides still contained black-on-white text, upright, in readable size. Moreover, as they continued their presentation, we noticed that all slides had exactly that same "bad" style. They were consistent! Although those students strived for something different, they subconciously applied good common sense and did all important things right. It was good design, after all.
I can confidently say I wasn't a big fan of the design, though.
Personally I make it clear in website design conversations that design is not graphic design or anything to do with drawing pretty pictures in Photoshop. I then explain that design is in the information architecture used to specify the products, the etymology of how the information is structured and the customer interaction and that we need to get that up to back-of-napkin sketch before we need worry ourselves with artistic interpretations of social network buttons.
Maybe I go a bit far in not wanting people fiddling with graphic design, I talk of that as 'theming' or 'styling the frontend'.
Reminds me of a magazine layout.
I kind of liked that part. If you already know about a term, you can skip over it, but if you don't, you get more info without leaving the page.