Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z may hail from the mind of Akira Toriyama, but they possess dramatically different tones. The former was a light-hearted, comedic adventure story about a boy looking for a mystical treasure, the Dragon Balls, with elements of martial arts mixed in. The latter was a show about martial-arts fighters going head-to-head with new adversaries, while the Dragon Balls played a more minor role and were used more as a fail-safe for when large numbers of people died.
While both stories followed the same cast of characters, there was a darker feel to Dragon Ball Z, with characters dying more often and with more violent imagery -- Cell absorbing people through his tail traumatized many a child back in the day. But if one was a sequel to the other, why did it feel like two completely different properties?
When Toriyama began Dragon Ball, he intended it as a retelling of the Chinese epic Journey to the West. Goku would serve as a stand-in for Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, and he would search for the legendary Dragon Balls, with other characters also inspired by the story. The series was lighter in tone, with a more child-like take on a grand adventure; there were fights to be had, but they seldom took center stage. They were a means to an end, and weren't meant to consume the majority of the runtime.
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However, later in the story the tone slowly began to shift from the adventure portion to the fights. Goku began to train with Master Roshi alongside Krillin, and they entered the World Martial Arts Tournament. That was the beginning of the fighting-focused series it is today. Toriyama wanted to end the series after Pilaf's defeat and Goku gathered the Dragon Balls, but his editor wouldn't allow it. That's when the series went from being a retelling of Journey to the West to the battle manga we know.
The editors are the main players in the change the series went through because they recognized a money-maker when they saw it. Yu Kondo, in particular, pushed Toriyama to make the series darker and the fights more grand. Toriyama tried to end the series several times throughout its run, but the editors pushed him to keep it going. Kondo urged for many of the major storylines in Dragon Ball Z, and had a hand in the creation of Gohan and Raditz. He also introduced the concept of new transformations and the return of the Great Ape form. It got to the point that Toriyama may have based Freiza on him.
Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z had different tones, and Toriyama's style changed to reflect that. Characters went from having softer palettes and shapes to being more vivid and angular. Toriyama had to make them more muscular to reflect the battle aspects and the training they needed to undergo to achieve certain feats. The character designs began to resemble that of other manga, such as Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and Fist of the North Star. The original designs looked more like Toriyama's other work, Dr. Slump, and appealed more to children. The new style was aimed at a more mature audience.
The drastic change in tone between Dragon Ball to Dragon Ball Z wasn't a result of Toriyama's creativity, but, rather, more from influence from his editors, particularly Yu Kondo. Because Kondo believed a battle manga would be more successful, and he saw how popular the original Dragon Ball was, he pushed Toriyama to continue the story in the way he wanted, not how Toriyama originally envisioned. That resulted in the drastic differences between the two iterations, with one being an adventure story and the other being a fighting story.
