Josh Evnin

A little thing called Typography

You know Craigslist, right? Great site, right? I definitely think so. The content is fantastic. The kinds of interactions it creates are possibly better than any other website on the entire interweb. You know what I don’t like about it?

It is horrifically UGLY.

You’re not allowed to disagree with me. You just aren’t.

Now it seems someone has come along and tried to do something about it. Design Eye for the List Guy has done a redesign and I love it. It keeps the old Craigslist style, but moves it forward with a beautiful new design. Really well done, I say.

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One response

  1. Erik Avatar
    Erik

    I think this is a really interesting phenomenon for designers to study. Myspace is really ugly too. Yet both of these sites are ridiculously successful and enable their users to wonderful things.

    Honestly, I don’t think craigslist should change. The fact that it hasn’t, and the reason craigslist and myspace are so successful is that they are user-centered, not beauty-centered.

    Sometimes I wonder whether typographers and snobs* are the only people who get any value from beautiful type.

    Of course, people get value when you solve major readability problems or make the visual cues more useful or informative, but in this case, the redesign seems to be mostly about aesthetics.

    So my question is: why bother?

    * meaning, people who need to be surrounded by “nice things”

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