What Makes Good Information Design?

What makes good information design? According to Information is Beautiful:

* Information needs to be interesting (meaningful & relevant) and have integrity (accuracy, consistency).
* Design needs to have form (beauty & structure) and function (it has to work and be easy to use).

In information design, it seems, if you have just two elements, you get something tolerable and cool. i.e.

* integrity + form = eye candy
* interestingness + function = experiment

But if you combine three elements without the fourth, things suddenly FAIL:

* interesting subject, solid information, looks great, but is hard to use = useless.
* amazing data, well designed, very easy to read but isn’t that interesting = boring

via information is beautiful