Those who know me probably have heard me say "I am more autistic than artistic", the sad thing is that this is probably not far from the truth (please don't take this as a trivialization of autism its a serious thing).
With that being said I appreciate art, and firmly believe a very basic application with a professional and compelling user experience will always have more success than one that does not even the former has a richer capability set.
Since I don't have a artistic bone in my body and I can't run when presented with a design problem I try to live by two key rules:
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"Users prefer consistency over efficiency" - If if you have a better way of doing things it may not make sense to do it that way, I know this sounds horrible but if there is a existing paradigm out there you should seriously consider using it as doing so means your users don't need to learn something fundamentally new just to use your application.
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"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" - There are only so many ways to layout and interact with data, and learning from others successes and failures and incorporating those learnings into your designs is not only a good thing for your users but those you learn from should (IMHO) be flattered that you thought they did something worth imitating even in the smallest ways.
I actually attribute a great portion of Windows early success to #1, Windows provided a framework that allowed third-party developers to focus on making computers more functional by providing them the tools to make their applications compelling from a user experience standpoint easily, this also resulted in these applications looking and behaving in a consistent manner reducing the learning curve to use computers increasing the demand, and so-on.
This is actually why I am suprised the Vista Media Center team has decided that for reasons other that resource availability (making and supporting stuff like that is not free) to not make their look and feel available as a set of common controls and templates, Charlie Owen has a blog post from 2006 on this topic here.
I guess some agree with me as there is now a SourceForge project called MCMLLookAlike that aspires to provide just this, I for one hope they are succesfull.
Some links I have found usefull in this area include:
The Web is all about Typography - http://www.informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period
Introduction to the 10-Foot Experience for Windows Game Developers - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb174608.aspx
Windows Vista(tm) Icon Development Guidelines - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511280.aspx
Rules for the Windows Vista User Experience http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511327.aspx
Some design shops who have produced work I think looks awsome include:
Thirtteen23 - http://www.thirteen23.com
frogDesign - http://www.frogdesign.com/
Do you have any links on this topic you have found usefull?