In designing a Web site, it’s hard to figure out how to make it pleasant and attractive as well as usable, readable, and accessible. I’ve mentioned Dan Cederholm’s site Cork’d as a good example of this balance, and the new New York Times site. But who do you go to when you need design advice?

Some usability people used to go to Jakob Nielsen, and some still do. But I’ve always felt that he and a lot of the usability gurus missed something about beauty, or niftiness, or some non-explicit thing that’s tied to the practice of design. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been looking at Edward Tufte’s books The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information, and I love them. His key concept is that as much of possible of a design should aid understanding, and as little ink (figurative in the case of the Web) as possible should be used for extraneous information or decoration.

Yet all of his examples are nice to look at. It’s as if he was a Jakob who understood graphic design.