When is usability over design more important?

Im creating a dashboard webpage for desktop and have a side bar as a navigation. The title is white and the dashboard names are white.

When looking at it, the white color makes it seem as if the dashboard names are not clickable. I've tried other colors to indicate that the text is clickable but is not very "aesthetic" looking with a gray background and some of them make it difficult to read. The only way someone would know its clickable is if they hover over it and the state of the text changes.

At what point is usability over design is much more important? Is there a specific threshold?