A review of Yahoo!'s new frontpage design by a former Yahoo! Gooey...

First, I really like the new visual design that Yahoo! is standardizing, first with 360 and now with the frontpage. It's clean, simple, elegant and minimal. It lets the content pop off the page and doesn't call attention to itself. I like it very much.

As far as layout goes, I like the left column listing the major properties and I guess I like the rest of it as well, all except for the masthead.

I think it's a fairly bad decision to offset the Yahoo! logo with the search box to its side. By offsetting the logo, it minimizes its prominence, importance and brand. By putting it alongside the searchbox it seems like a weak attempt to bring more prominence to Yahoo!'s search. But now you have two elements that are weaker by being side by side. Plus it throws the balance of the page as a whole out of whack.

If you want more people to use your search engine, build a better search engine.