Thomas Houston of The Verge offers a cool look at a 2007 Google redesign that never saw the light of day:
A group of Googlers showed off some never-before-seen design prototypes today at SXSW that showed a very different design direction from what was recently rolled out across the Google universe. While 2011’s launch, dubbed “Strawman,” was one of the biggest in the company’s history, Google made similar efforts to redesign the company’s entire stock of sites in 2007 with the Kanna project.
I love design process stories like this. Recent design improvements across all of Google’s brands seem to support the idea of more forward-thinking executive leadership. That is to say, Larry Page is less of a curmudgeon than Eric Schmidt.