I don’t mean, however, that emotion is not important. I just don’t agree that aesthetics necessarily convey or create emotions. I have been to beautifully designed websites, filled with slick fonts and a pretty flash effects… but I hated most of them simply because I could not do what I wanted.

Equally when I am working on aesthetics I don’t have to think too much about
usability and visual hierarchy, instead focusing on branding and
personality.

That said, you still need to look at the design as a whole and not just
as separate components.

‘even if linking the word “here” gave me a greater clickthrough rate, I’d avoid it for the usability abomination that it represents’

Although he doesn’t explicitly say it, I think Gerry agrees too, so that makes three of us :)

As a usability expert ~and~ designer, I think that good design aesthetics are part of determining the usability of a site. There are so many things that a user brings when visiting a site that it’s impossible to declare concrete “best practices” for usability. Black backgrounds, underlines for links, etc., are all relatively minor things that really depend on the user you are trying to attract. Usability really comes down to the user you want to attract to your site. If you think your user will respond to your aesthetic, then make design aesthetic the most important thing. How do you determine what your user wants? Well, ~that’s~ where the usability and user research comes in.

To steal a quote from Whitney Hess (via a recent ALA article), “User experience designers are liaisons, not subject matter experts, doctors or any type of magical beings. We don’t have a set of best practices that we can robotically implement, nor do we have all the answers. Our greatest skill is that we know how to listen.”

It is when it is treated as window dressing that it loses its’ communicative value. Underlined links were born in a time of limited options…Yes, some sites obliterate the difference in links and normal text but railing against that practice ignores the huge number of examples where alternatives have clearly been sucessful.

An entire generation of younger people will never recall underlined links being any sort of standard. The diversification of media and content delivery is just going to change all those rules and conventions will cross-populate….look at how many new conventions have made their way out of the mobile phone world into the web.

I personally love Dustin Curtis’ site design and find it extremely readable (doesn’t the high-contrast setting used by people with low vision give you a black background?).

Despite what we all learned about usability and content being king and how the best way to do things is to throw a slab of text on a white background, I’m finding myself increasingly attracted to sites that do the opposite and make an effort with the design while keeping it accessible (eg Dustin’s, jasonsantamaria.com and thebolditalic.com).

If I can say this without bashing Gerry’s site (as it’s definitely not unique to his site), I find the slab of black text on white background far less readable… when was the last time you read a magazine that was just text on white and nothing else?