The ideal situation occurs when the things that we regard as beautiful are also regarded by other people as useful.

--Donald Knuth

Oh yes indeed!

  Stacked graphs–geometry & aesthetics - Byron et al 2008

References

Byron, Lee and Wattenberg, Martin (2008) ‘Stacked Graphs – Geometry & Aesthetics’, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 14(6), pp. 1245–1252, [online] Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2008.166 (Accessed 30 April 2013).

Van Horn, John Darrell, Irimia, Andrei, Torgerson, Carinna M., Chambers, Micah C., et al. (2012) ‘Mapping Connectivity Damage in the Case of Phineas Gage’, PLoS ONE, 7(5), [online] Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353935/ (Accessed 30 April 2013).