It’s true, I detest MySpace and have thus far, managed to avoid it like the plague. But regardless of what I think, that wart-toad designed site is the hottest thing since email.

When it comes to some of the web’s most popular sites - is their success because of or in spite of ‘ugly’ design?

In his 2004 AIGA magazine piece It’s Good to Be Bad, David Volgler observed a troubling trend in web design. Pointing to six popular but ugly websites (including the infamous hampster dance site) Volgler said he’s “haunted by a troubling question: does a website have to be well-designed to be popular?” The six sites that Volgler mentions are all, by any reasonable aesthetic judgment, ugly. Even worse, they’re annoying. But does ugly and annoying mean poorly-designed?

Robert Scoble recently raised a similar point concerning Craigslist, MySpace, and Google. He suggested that in some cases ugly sites are more appealing than pretty ones because they are more authentic, less commercial, and look like they were done for love instead of money. Here Scoble questions a major tenet of design by suggesting that ugly is not only not bad design, but good design…. Source: thinkvitamin.com