ergophobe - 12:54 pm on Oct 9, 2009 (gmt 0)

That's a great quote. It goes beyond the "Form follows function" to something a bit deeper. I find that if you appreciate design, even if like me you are not personally good at it, a very clean and simple design can have real beauty and it's important not to confuse glitz with beauty.

To some extent, that speaks to denisl's question - there are very beautiful sites that have no images. Beauty in design is a matter of composition, balance and coherence. Images may or may not be a part of that. On the web, they almost necessarily are, but they can be small and modest graphics and need not take up a lot bandwidth.

BTW, I mentioned Christopher Alexander's books above and haven't heard from anyone who says they've read them. I can't recommend them enough - they've had a huge impact on architecture (often recognized as the most important book on architecture in the second half of the twentieth century), but also on software development as well (source of the idea of design patterns in programming).