Wider Angle: CNN's Lo-Fi Facelift

I was standing in the shower yesterday contemplating the future of web design. (You don't?) The problem that had me in there an extra ten minutes was trying to divine the next Style. At the moment, the hottest, shiniest sites are just that -- shiny -- and I'm not complaining. I think the subtle gradients, neon greens, and slight reflections all look very pretty. It's at least better than ten years ago when everything was rectangular and messages scrolled in the browser status bar. Design is clean. Layout is simple. Pages are, gasp, pretty. Life is good.

But really, what's next? Where do we go from here?

My fingers were shrivveling and the bathroom was getting too steamy so I needed to at least settle on an answer I could come back to later. My thoughts turned to del.icio.us and its extreme lo-fi style and design, and how well that streamlines everything I do there. I next thought of Flickr, a tool I'm using more and more, and how everything I need is a click away, but it's not cluttered and it's not even pretty in an artsy way. It's just elegant and simple. Countless designers' portfolio sites are veering in the same direction in an effort to showcase their work with as little process as possible to get to it. So I settled on Lo-Fi as the future of design, at least in the next few years. As with all styles, it's not the best for everything, and it won't work for everyone, but using my Junior Detective parascoping mirror to peer around the corner, that's what I see.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought I could be very wrong. Who would really like simple boxes with simple text? Clean navigation and easy displays to make information clearer for users? As good as that sounds, I was having trouble imagining a corporation embracing it on a large scale.

It was in the middle of that doubting carnival that I came across CNN's redesign of their onscreen graphics system.

It's clean, it's easy, and it's straight from the web. And it works.