design evolution of yahoo! and google
Screenshot: weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY
John Maeda compared the design evolution of google and yahoo!:
“Today I was asked by Jessie Scanlon of Business Week regarding the difference between the design of Google and Yahoo! So, I fired up the the all-seeing eye of archive.org to look way back in the past. In short, a lot happened and nothing happened. I captured the evolutionary process in some thumbnails I collected and arranged in the image above (which has a larger version if you click on it). The top row is the evolution of Yahoo! and the bottom row is Google. I had forgotten that Yahoo! came first. As you can see from the thumbnail, in 1996 Yahoo! looked not so much different from Google. And then in 1997 the once familiar two-column approach emerged. Around 2000 everything got terribly complex.”
related link:
Yahoogle! - Simplicity is about staying simple.