The challenge was to create a website that celebrated Yahoo! JAPAN's 21st anniversary and the Internet by presenting their histories in an enjoyable way while still being informative and educational. Younger generations are often oblivious to the Internet before Instagram or Facebook. In order to gain their interest, we collaborated with artist John Hathway, whose illustration style embodies the global anime phenomenon. We compiled 1390 events into one long illustration to provide a smartphone friendly UX. Each illustrated event was then made clickable for users to be able to share them on their social media platforms.

In the first three months, we meticulously researched the history of the Internet along with a team of experts. On the illustration side, we collaborated with John Hathway and his team to create an overall outline, followed by some rough sketches for the individual 1390 events. This was followed by more detailed illustrations, then finally adding color and finishing touches. The illustrations were meticulously animated by our tech team, and turned into an interactive website where users could click on events to view more information and share them on social media. At the same time, we created 4 different versions of the website so that all users could visit the website (low and high resolution for smartphones, PC and Mac compatible versions).The process in all took 8 months for completion.

The individual events were shared over 3,000 times on Facebook, retweeted over 1,500 times on Twitter, and the website had 1,110,000 page views. By users sharing particular events on their social media accounts, not only did they get to learn more about the History of the Internet, but gave their friends and family more insight on how the internet grew to what it has become today.