How would you answer the question: 'What is design?' Do you imagine that it's primarily an act of creativity, perhaps something beautiful that an artist might produce?
A good designer always works to keep the form, function and the aesthetic quality of a design in balance throughout the life of a project. Just because something looks good doesn’t mean its useful.
I recently stumbled across screenshots of old websites of mine and was hurled into a state of reminiscent shock. I knew they were bad, but wow they were outstandingly horrible (redeemed only by their microformats support!