Two Faces of Design

I originally intended just to point out this interesting post about the success of “ugly” design, arguing that unattractive sites such as del.icio.us are successful because the lack of design communicates to the user a lack of marketing or corporate influence.
But then I found a response to the conversation that I liked even more: disambiguity’s separating of information/interaction design from visual design. And, having just talked to one of my classes about the distinction between logical versus physical tags and why one might use one over the other, I liked seeing the point made that a site with good information and interaction design but poor visual design can succeed (and the ugly design examples given in the first link would fall in that catagory) whereas good visual design without good information and interaction design will fail. Of course, the ideal is to have both, but what this conversation is really about is the fact that it is rare to have both, and so there is a clear prefernce for which to focus on, if you will only do one.
Also worth reading is the contrast of the old and redesigned Craig’s List at the bottom of the disambiguity article.