Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

randomwire.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 135 posts

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#61

Post by cclogg »

normalhuman wrote: post #8

I think it is also hard to be aware that you are in a trend when you are living it. Many of the things that pass as "clean design" at the moment are just a trend, and I promise you that they will look dated soon. This always happens. It happened with 80s hair, with 90s androgyny and it will happen again big text, extreme minimalist, big poetic photo backgrounds and so on.

I agree with this, but I guess many Asian websites do feel like they're stuck in a 1998 trend. Actually this also seems to apply to music too... when I hear my Taiwanese friends' music, it seems like it still hasn't escaped boy-band era (1998?).

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#63

Post by sanskritabelt »

doctorstupid wrote: post #7

The Japonic devotion to craftmanship does not typically extend into the virtual world. The culture certainly places an emphasis on physical goods. I disagree in general with his statement, but Nobel Prize winner in physics Hideki Yukawa said that "The Japanese mentality is, in most cases, unfit for abstract thinking, and takes interest merely in tangible things".

He also said that at least 46 years ago.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#64

Post by w1ntermute »

redthrowaway wrote: post #40
pyre wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you average all of those feelings out, then does it mean that we really are living in a 1980's version of the future?

Only tangentially related if that, but I re-read Neuromancer recently and realized with some sadness that its very evocative opening line [1] will quite quickly cease to have meaning for generations who grew up without analog TVs. We tend to think of literature as timeless, but there's a very real, if small, slice of it washed out by the tide of shifting metaphors. [1] "The sky above the port was the color of televis…

> realized with some sadness that its very evocative opening line [1] will quite quickly cease to have meaning for generations who grew up without analog TVs

Meh, I don't think this is really a worry. We still read Shakespeare - we just have to make an extra effort to understand the nuances. In fact, that's part of what makes it so interesting.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#65

Post by coldtea »

cclogg wrote: post #61
normalhuman wrote: post #8

I think it is also hard to be aware that you are in a trend when you are living it. Many of the things that pass as "clean design" at the moment are just a trend, and I promise you that they will look dated soon. This always happens. It happened with 80s hair, with 90s androgyny and it will happen again big text, extreme minimalist, big poetic photo backgrounds and so on.

I agree with this, but I guess many Asian websites do feel like they're stuck in a 1998 trend. Actually this also seems to apply to music too... when I hear my Taiwanese friends' music, it seems like it still hasn't escaped boy-band era (1998?).

>when I hear my Taiwanese friends' music, it seems like it still hasn't escaped boy-band era

1998 might have been "boy-band era" for YOUR culture. Not for everyone in the world. The have their own culture, they don't have to escape to some current trend in the USA.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#66

Post by xixi77 »

CognitiveLens wrote: post #13

The anecdotal cultural 'explanations' here are a little ridiculous without some real data to reference. > Logographic-based languages... actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space not true - article with references: http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chine... > Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters which li…

> Logographic-based languages... actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space

not true - article with references: http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chine...

This article and references is about continued reading speed (bandwidth), and as it notes all languages read at similar speed, because the bottleneck is in cognitive processing. Actually, how adults read English is not much different from how they read Chinese -- ie. we do not parse individual letters, just as a Chinese reader does not parse character components.

But for a shopping website, the relevant issue is not bandwidth, but latency -- ie. how fast the reader can recognize what's written on a button, and I suspect the results there may be quite different.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#67

Post by ics »

Pitarou wrote: post #16

A few more points: - Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable space, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich interfaces have an advantage. This may well explain why Yahoo! Japan's portal is so much more popular than Google's. - I can well imagine that, in the minds of the staid gerontocrats who maintain an iron grip on Japanese corporate life, a website is merely a m…

Somewhere I have a text file with links to several studies on information density and reading characteristics, but for now this might be interesting (unfortunately some of the pages before are cut):

http://books.google.com/books?id=BdrgETRVl74C&pg=PA99&lpg=PA...

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#68

Post by chrismonsanto »

pflats wrote: post #53
verisimilidude wrote: post #51

One of these points is way off the mark. I'll add my own two cents. Language Barrier - The web and most of the programming languages which drive it were designed by English speakers or western corporations and hence the majority of documentation and educational resources are also in English. Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted. 1. Many of the Japanese c…

> Many of the Japanese coders I've met have put in the effort to learn English. I put a longer response addressing this point in a different thread, but you're interacting with the cohort that has already chosen to be a computer programmer . It's a biased sample group. I would expect people with no interest in learning English would be disinclined to even enter programming. (This is still tertiary to actual cultural…

I'd like to add to this remark that the Japanese as a whole are not as proficient at English as one might expect. I know I had some expectation that the Japanese had some working knowledge of English (maybe because many countries do encourage learning it?), but after visiting Tokyo I realized my assumption was way off the mark.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#69

Post by ics »

buster wrote: post #3

I guess the cultural aspect is a big reason here. Everyone who has ever watched japanese television or has seen the nightlife of major japanese cities will be overwhelmed by the amound of screaming, blinking lights and information, it's quite different from the western point of view.. :)

Interestingly the information rate of spoken Japanese is comparatively low.

http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#70

Post by jonnathanson »

akgerber wrote: post #56
jonnathanson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm half convinced that we're seeing the result of a brilliant conspiracy by Getty Images, Shutterstock and Corbis to infiltrate the design landscape of Silicon Valley and sell more stock photography. Also: the Golden Gate needs a better agent. Given how many times that bridge has appeared in photo backdrops, it should be rich enough by now to stretch further into Marin.

Apparently the CEO of Shutterstock is NYC's first tech billionaire: http://www.forbes.com/sites/edwindurgy/2013/06/28/oh-snap-sh...

All kidding aside, he's an impressive businessman. Evidently Shutterstock was bootstrapped for a large portion of its 10-year existence -- which is interesting, considering the size and capitalization of the entrenched players it was going up against.

http://jonoringer.com/2013/05/28/go-as-long-as-possible-with...

Post reply on HN