Also interesting how, when Japanese fonts are used to write English, you can always tell that it winds the clock back about 20 years and turns to an inelegant pixelated dot-matrix level appearance.
Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
51–60 of 213 posts
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#52I 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…
> I still find wifi to be incredibly scarce in Tokyo. Train stations, 7-11, Family Mart, Starbucks, Gasuto, McD's. Plus all of the locations in the Japan Connected-free wifi app.
Wifi WAS extremely scarce in Japan. When I lived there a few years ago the phone plans were great for me but it was very difficult for friends visiting to have internet even in Tokyo. When I was there last year there seemed to have been a pretty big push in preparation for the Olympics, most stations did not have WiFi in 2015 when I moved away as an example
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was basically the Japanese equivalent of WAP before smartphones but it's completely irrelevant now and even when it was a thing, I'm not sure it was relevant to desktop sites like this article is talking about.
i-mode usage peaked in 2008. While it has been falling since, it probably only became irrelevant around the time this was written. A lot of the Japanese sites that I visit(ed) were designed for i-Mode first/only as late as 2011.
My understanding that i-mode markup was very limited and didn't include tables or css, so I don't think it would be possible for desktop sites from 2011 to have been designed for i-mode first. Common Japanese sites for desktop browsers from this period as described in the original article were extremely cluttered in a way that would have been completely impossible to read on a feature phone with i-mode.
I believe that as with WAP, it was necessary to have completely separate i-mode sites, so I don't think the front end rendering of one would necessarily affect the other even if companies like Yahoo Japan were serving similar content over both.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#54Hmmm I definitely disagree with the “lacking emphasis”part. One of the Japanese alphabets is literally used to draw attention to words
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#55I 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…
FYI: "ublock original" is the better and independend ad-blocker.
I had to disable uBlock Origin to get the entire page to load, so in this case it has more to do with some filter.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#56This 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?
There are starting to be tools aimed at generating a font file from a more compact representation that would let you e.g. reuse radicals between characters, but the font file formats are pretty wedded to each glyph's entry being independent AIUI.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#57Regarding 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…
This!!! I'd much, much rather have some obvious in thr face banner ad then the shit that passes for modern web these days. Less information does not mean more useable.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#58The crammed design is also seen in their electronics and other household items. Things that seemingly that have 1 function such as rice cookers and toilets are jam packed with buttons, lights and beeping. I also avoided Toyotas because of the crammed dashboard/consoles and all the beeping. Unlock door, closing hatch door, starting the car is just beep, beep, beep. Instead of toggles like BMW, they would have an indiv…
Actually that's exactly why I like Japanese made product. In the west it's almost always 3 button device but to access most functionality you need to do some arcane ritual like press this button for 5 seconds then press this button then you will see the LED flashing and now you can do what you want. I'd MUCH rather have 30 buttons all which precisely do one thing.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
This "crammed" design allows for button-function coupling, which makes buttons stateless and predictable.
I don’t know about anyone else but the move to touch screens has been awful. I don’t need 2 menu layers to adjust the air temp or seat heater. All I really want is apple carplay.
+1000
It's one thing to have a touch screen to control your phone - where your attention is the phone.
It's another to have a touch screen to control the accessories of your car - where your attention is driving.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#60Visually this website design reminds me a lot of Dekochari [1] and Dekotora [2]. Dekochari are highly decorated bicycles, and Dekotora highly decorated trucks.
All of them have this very bright, visually busy style that is, as the website says, very different than some imagine the Japanese aesthetics.