Cray Cray Craigslist

Craigslist is a community, an entity, a living organism larger than any one person, place, or thing.

It's almost unfathomable that craigslist.org still exists in 2016, 20 years and counting since its web launch, in the age of social media and countless online communities. The design of the home page itself indicates that little has changed since its origins in the wild-west, mid-nineties web.

Everything from shoes to tractors can be purchased in Craigslist's vast classified listings and one can arrange for everything from a carpool to daycare to a "casual encounter" in its immense personal listings and community forums. The Craigslist community is full of sketchy perverts, flaky buyers, scammers, and, to a lesser extent, honest, normal people who are just trying to buy and sell stuff. If there's one word that defines the Craigslist experience, it's crazy.

Despite its flaws and implausibility, craigslist.org serves more than 20 billion page views per month worldwide and is one of the top-ten most viewed sites in the United States.

Over the years there have been countless uninitiated attempts by third parties to redesign the Craigslist interface by incorporating everything from the 2000s Web 2.0 aesthetic to anti-skeuomorphic design. Philanthropic designers have spent hours rewriting the HTML and CSS to incorporate web standards and re-coding the site for responsive conformity. Creative experts have refined the user experience down to a limited set of menus and buttons in the sacred name of minimalism.

To this day, the official Craigslist design remains largely unchanged. And let's be honest, unless something drastic happens, Craigslist will probably never redesign.

But consider for a moment the size of the beast that is Craigslist, the nature of its community, and its stranglehold on society. It is evident that Craigslist needs not conform to a contemporary corporate design paradigm. Rather, Craigslist should double-down on its defining characteristic.

This solution takes the Craigslist we all know and love and amplifies the cray-cray.

The main menu is indeed stripped down with only a search box, a login and a link to create a post. The background image randomly populates from a set of offbeat graphics along with a complementary accent color in the text and menus. The image/color combination remains in place throughout the browsing experience until the window is closed or the page is refreshed.

The lawn...