This is because each font requires thousands of
characters to be individually designed which is
prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and
would take longer to download.
Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
21–30 of 213 posts
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#22Don't want to light a fire here but I'd like to note that there is inherently something about Japanese culture (or Asian culture for that matter) that inhibits software development growth. Everything in Asia screams of respect for elders. In this case, the elders are the old design patterns and the older programming languages. It's the thought of why do something when it's not broken? As we move forward globally, we are all now realizing that it takes disruption to really create change. Something cultures in Asia are strongly against but are now slowly grasping. I believe this will all change within the next decade or so.
Just to add to this, I am Asian myself so I have experienced this and seen this first hand.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#23The better question would be why Japan in general maintains its differences/idiosyncrasies from the west? Web design is not the only thing that differs.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#24[2013] This has made the rounds on HN several times already. 153 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 129 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067
I was thinking something similar - these days really valuable contents seem to resurface from a few years back.
Two days ago I was reading a blog post from 2012 which I though was worthwhile.
Walden's Thoreau states that 'Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.'
=> I believe that we are lacking the commitment that one had to put into a project such intent as a book then with the current fastfood social medial / article generation. I also believe that in its place, a hybrid of sorts will come and surface softly back multiple time to underline the impact it left on the collective unconscious. This sounds like what we're seeing.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#25I had to disable Adblock Plus for some reason to get the entire page to load. Ditto on the point where Japan is stuck in the 1980s future. Everything's optimized for tiny cellphone screens optimized for text. If I recall correctly iPhone adoption was slow, and many people lacked a desktop to provide updates. I still find wifi to be incredibly scarce in Tokyo. If people want a desktop, they go to a cafe. If they want…
The bit about scarce WiFi is surprising. Back in 2005, I did a lot of warbiking in Tokyo, and signals were easy to find.
That was 15 years ago, everyone has high speed mobile plans now so there's no demand for public Wi-Fi.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#26Don't want to light a fire here but I'd like to note that there is inherently something about Japanese culture (or Asian culture for that matter) that inhibits software development growth. Everything in Asia screams of respect for elders. In this case, the elders are the old design patterns and the older programming languages. It's the thought of why do something when it's not broken? As we move forward globally, we…
As if the "change" we have in UX currently is a good thing. Radical minimalism and the prioritization of clean design and simplicity over functionality doesn't necessarily look like progress to me.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#27(Disclaimer: IANAL - I am not a linguist)
The Japanese language itself has very low "information density" - it takes many more syllables to convey the same thing in Japanese than it does in most languages. This is the result of the language having much tighter phonotactic constraints; literally there are fewer "legal" phonemes (and combinations of them) in Japanese than in most other languages. [1] This isn't a criticism of the language of course - just an interesting tradeoff: A Japanese speaker has fewer sounds to learn, but must learn to speak them faster in order to convey their ideas.
As a result, Japanese speakers are some of the fastest speakers in terms of syllables/second, out of necessity.
Therefore it's no surprise that the typography is going to appear more "densely packed" on a Japanese website. With the exception of Kanji which is a pictographic (logographic? I'm not really a linguist) writing system consisting of many, many characters (and thus can be quite information-dense) - Japanese's other writing systems are purely phonetic - each character representing a single syllable. Take a look at the front page of a Japanese newspaper and show it to an English speaker, they will think it's "crowded", but I bet if you translated it to English you'd see something that resembles a typical English paper.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#28Regarding advertising, the article states: "Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people Japanese companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the maximal concentration of information into the smallest space akin to a pamphlet rather than an interactive tool." I find this quite ironic, especially given how unusab…
I agree with you but unfortunately these sites almost always have poor usability too.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#29This is because each font requires thousands of characters to be individually designed which is prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and would take longer to download. Presumably a coherent hand-designed Japanese font reuses the same style strokes in different combinations. Are there tools to reduce the full set of glyphs to a subset of component elements?
Even if you don't go down to the individual stroke level you can break kanji up into a set of radicals. If you mix that up with the katakana, hiragana, roman letters, and punctuation it's maybe something like 500 characters.
Given the affluence of emoji's and various Unicode symbols these days it weakens that argument even further.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#30Regarding advertising, the article states: "Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people Japanese companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the maximal concentration of information into the smallest space akin to a pamphlet rather than an interactive tool." I find this quite ironic, especially given how unusab…
Japanese websites? Are we kidding here? What design? Let's just be honest about it. Sites like these suck and there is no reason to make excuses about it or attribute it to some cultural aesthetic. Most things in Japan are designed beautifully. Websites in Japan are an exception.