Andreas Norman

Norman Advanced Archive Widget is a free replacement for the standard WordPress archive widget. Norman Advanced Archive Widget has plenty of neat customization options available that the default archive widget is lacking, like the ability to group monthly archives by year and let them fold using JQuery.
<h4>Features:</h4>
<ul>
<li>Option to limit display of archive by current category. Only the posts in the current category will be listed</li>
<li>Option to group monthly archives by year </li>
<li>JQuery powered fold to show and hide monthly archives in a year.</li>
<li>Option to truncate month names or not.</li>
<li>Option to show/hide archive count and the design option to decide if you want the count to be displayed inside the link or not.</li>
</ul>

Norman Advanced Archive Widget

Norman Advanced Archive Widget is a free replacement for the standard WordPress archive widget. Lots of customization options to satisfy your needs.

Tiago Madeira

The website of the brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo has a nice way to 
display news in a retrospective-style (check <a href="http://blog.tiagomadeira.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/estadao.jpg" rel="nofollow ugc">this 
screenshot</a> 
or <a href="http://www.estadao.com.br/especiais/choque-nas-ruas,158638.htm" rel="nofollow ugc">this link</a> 
— Flash required).
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could display WordPress posts in our pages and 
categories in the same way just by using a shortcode? The possibilities are 
many. That’s why I wrote the Retrospective plugin for WordPress.
It has at least two advantages over the version you just saw:
<ul>
<li>Does not require Flash (its implementation uses only CSS and jQuery)</li>
<li>Has a option to respect the (time-)scale of the posts.</li>
</ul>
See Installation for more info on how to use it.

Retrospective

Retrospective plugin displays last posts or posts from a specific category in a nice-looking "retrospective" way using a shortcode.

Norman Advanced Archive Widget vs Retrospective