Andy Rutledge is a design writer covering design principles, web design as product design, and a well-known unsolicited redesign of NYTimes.com.
Commenters call his archive a great introduction to design, especially his articles on perception and gestalt principles, though his NYT redesign draws debate.
Andy Rutledge's blog has lots of good stuff. His five-part introduction to gestalt principles is about the basics of graphic design:
http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-1-figure-ground-relationship.php
http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-2-similarity.php
http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-3.php
http://www.andyrutledge.com/common-fate.php
http://www.andyrutledge.com/closure.php
For typography, Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style is a must-read. http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881791326.
You mentioned the looks of your sites, so the above are about visual and graphic design, but good interaction design will also help making people think your site looks better, is faster, has more features etc.
Be careful whose judgement you trust. People here on HN sometimes seem to have a caricatured view of users as only being attracted to visuals. In reality, visuals can't do much more than support (or ruin) an otherwise well-designed site.
> if everything was high contrast, everything would be SCREAMING AT YOU FOR ATTENTION
Simply not true. There's many more factors besides contrast that determine attention focus.
See this excellent series on gestalt principles of design:
http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-1-figure-ground-relationship.php
(it's five parts you need to click to get to the other 4)
Also see http://24ways.org/2007/typesetting-tables which shows a very nice way of adding structure to a table using contrast, instead of making everything scream for attention equally. (Additionally, the site used a different layout when this article was written in 2007, and currently it seems 24ways is a good example of low-contrast crappy readability :) )
For starters, see the footer: http://www.andyrutledge.com/calculating-hours.php (His home page is changed so doesn't link to them all)
http://www.alistapart.com/ Does talk about psychology and logic behind design.
http://52weeksofux.com/ UX
And Don't make me think. An awesome book on usability: http://amzn.to/uZ4uH5
I haven't found any great resource on Information Architecture yet.
<selfpromiton> I wrote a very brief intro to them all: http://www.64notes.com/design/design-and-subsets-essay/ </selfpromiton>
Based on the timing, I believe he's talking about the redesign exercise Andy Rutledge did @ http://andyrutledge.com/news-redux.php
Khoi Vinh is being a poor sport here. Criticism is an important part of the design world. In school we're taught to use criticism as another resource and learn from it. The design team at the New York Times could have learned a lot from this 'unsolicited' exercise. Instead, they chose to be offended.
In this post, yes (though he does insinuate that the NY Times has too strong of an editorial bias). In others, no:
https://twitter.com/#!/andyrutledge/status/95664717669994496
https://twitter.com/#!/andyrutledge/status/94536441488621569
http://www.andyrutledge.com/how-to-join-aiga.php
Again, if it works for him, great. It just makes it harder for me personally to be objective about him and his work.
That simply isn't true.
> Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages. Story pages could still have one or two tastefully-presented ads, but preservation of the content is what will keep readers happy, engaged, and willing to continue paying their subscriptions…just like in olden times.
http://andyrutledge.com/images09/newsSite/nyt-redux-article.html