Our Craigslist (by Khoi Vinh)

subtraction.com

19 points·castway··8 comments

I have yet to see a single Craigslist redesign that improves on the existing site in any significant way, IMHO.

The "tragedy of Craigslist"? It's one of the most popular sites on the internet, one of the highest revenue per employee companies anyhwere --- and somehow it's a tragedy because they're still using table-based layouts?

The original is waaay better than that.

Don't fix if it ain't broken.

I can't shake the feeling that the programming equivalent of such redesigns is rewriting stuff in Lisp for no reason. Everyone desperately wants to believe their own profession is important, and prove it to others.

I normally really like Khoi Vinh's work but he fell short in my eyes. It definitely has a NY Times feel to it. Apparently redesigning Craigslist is harder then even great designers think.

I actually really like what Khoi did - remember, it's more about information design than visual identity that defines Craigslist- Khoi opened it up, added lines (helps the eyes deal with the immense amount of text) and called out important stuff.

Dropping the list of cities is a massive improvement too.

The difficulties (or problems) that the 'establishment' has with craigslist are fundamentally philosophical.

To wit, I wonder how that 'watch list' scales under load, and whether in the process of supporting it Craig and co. will need to expand their staff to nytimes proportions, and thus, start wondering about how to make money to feed all the new additions.

The whole beauty of craigslist.org is that it serves a Facebook scale audience without any of the theatrics.

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