This may be my favorite A List Apart article ever. Patrick Lynch presents a thoughtful, well-argued position on behalf of visual design on the web:

Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain. In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.

There’s not a whole lot that’s incredibly new here, but Lynch’s argument — which includes conscious and sub-conscious cognitive processing and a discussion of the difference in role between classical (clean) and expressive (Comm. Arts) aesthetics — brings a lot together quite nicely.

Hopefully the non-visual designers reading this appreciated it as much as I did, and the visual designers didn’t stop reading three paragraphs in due to the relative lack of graphics and long paragraphs :)