Once I heard Marissa Mayer recount that she asked Sergey Brin where he got the idea of doing such a minimalist design for Google. Sergey's answer was: I don't do HTML.
There's similar quotes in an interview with Larry and Sergey in "Designing Interactions" by Bill Moggridge. Sergey explains (in a lot more detail than I do here) that they kept the front page simple because they didn't want to spend too much time on the front page. Only afterwards did they realise how powerful that was, and they decided to keep things off there as much as possible.
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Once I heard Marissa Mayer recount that she asked Sergey Brin where he got the idea of doing such a minimalist design for Google. Sergey's answer was: I don't do HTML.
There's similar quotes in an interview with Larry and Sergey in "Designing Interactions" by Bill Moggridge. Sergey explains (in a lot more detail than I do here) that they kept the front page simple because they didn't want to spend too much time on the front page. Only afterwards did they realise how powerful that was, and they decided to keep things off there as much as possible.