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Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

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Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#111

Post by krapp »

dead_phish wrote: post #109
j03w wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from having Latin-like script I don't think there is much similarity between English and Vietnamese. Either way, isn't Japan also famous for its engineering prowess? I doubt that country with such high engineering competency will lack talent for web development simply because of the language barrier (if there is actually the lack of talent at all). I'm not saying language barrier doesn't exist but if language b…

Japan's engineering prowess - very distinct from any sort of design prowess. Look at the classic example of Honda and Toyota, two great engineering companies who succeeded in spite of their design. The early Toyotas were derided as ugly little box cars, and their only redeeming value was that they were cheap and well engineered.

Or possibly that is good design prowess - if you're Japanese.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#112

Post by krapp »

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…

There may also be something to these sites appearing noisier to Western eyes because Japanese characters, being more complicated, appear aesthetically noisier than Roman characters.

Just a guess though.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#113

Post by dead_phish »

krapp wrote: post #111
dead_phish wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan's engineering prowess - very distinct from any sort of design prowess. Look at the classic example of Honda and Toyota, two great engineering companies who succeeded in spite of their design. The early Toyotas were derided as ugly little box cars, and their only redeeming value was that they were cheap and well engineered.

Or possibly that is good design prowess - if you're Japanese.

I would argue it's less 'good' design and more that design is a secondary, or ever tertiary concern - which, from an engineering standpoint, it is.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#114

Post by adregan »

I see it like this:

I regularly used a fax machine at my job in Japan, and personal computers were not prevalent in my workplace. Businesses are very conservative and don't want to stand out.

In Japan, print is still the dominant way of spreading information. I always figured that the best designers ended up as print designers—and my web developer friends used Dreamweaver.

Not only that, CSS is very inconsistent with its english: "visibility: visible" OK! so then the opposite is "visibility: invisible" right? No. It's hidden.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#115

Post by ics »

lovemenot wrote: post #106
ics wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly the information rate of spoken Japanese is comparatively low. http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...

That is interesting. Though I don't have supporting evidence I find that the exformation rate of Japanese language amongst native speakers is relatively high. This view is widely held by Japanese people themselves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishin-denshin

I'm familiar with the concept as it's one of the things that makes me feel even more comfortable with the language– for certain things at least. That being said, there is also a form of comedy based on the vagueness and misinterpretation of speech. I'm at a loss for what it's called– a quick check brought me to manzai[0] but it's not what I'm thinking of. I'll have to keep searching.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzai

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#116

Post by Pitarou »

ics wrote: post #69
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_...

That's a side-effect of having fewer phonemes.

But with 2000+ characters to choose from, written text can be very dense.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#117

Post by uniclaude »

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…

> Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? This sounds much more like surface intuition than considered insight

I'm not the OP, but I am working on side projects here in Japan with two guys working for local large internet players, and I personally worked for another very large one where I was close to technological decisions at the company level, so I'll offer more than "surface intuition".

Language barrier exists. Not only the lack of documentation (which is real), but the lack of Japanese stackoverflow (&co.) answers, fewer people on the mailing lists, and other language related problems seriously hamper the adoption of new technologies. It is also one of the many factors behind the large amount of NIH seen around. Using open source maintained libraries in your software makes less sense if no one on your team will be able to read the docs, changelogs, & co. NDAs prevent me to cite examples, but I'm sure you get the point.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#118

Post by Pitarou »

rapind wrote: post #94
blah32497 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expand this to include the sciences. I did a 2 month industry internship in Japan a few years ago and I was blown away by the effects of the language barrier. They are incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. While the rest of the world is publishing their results in English, they are publishing in their own Japanese trade journals. It's kind of ironic, b/c in a less developed country (China), or a…

Well Ruby came out of Japan. So in 1995 some of Japan's coders were programming like it was 2005.

This is an interesting case. A new programming language is a frail thing, and can only grow and prosper if it finds an unoccupied niche. Japan was the perfect environment for Ruby to develop until it was ready to take on the world.

It's as if mammals evolved on an island without any dinosaurs, and then swam over to the mainland.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#119

Post by ericdykstra »

I'm surprised this article got so many upvotes. It's a lot of anecdotal evidence, and even the anecdotes and websites they pointed out don't support the point that much.

http://yahoo.com and http://yahoo.co.jp both have similar, tight aesthetic with a lot going on.

http://youtube.com (view in incognito if you are signed into an account http://nicovideo.jp are very similarly information-dense. I'd say Youtube's layout is even more jumbled with all the different column widths as you go down the page.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/ and http://newyorktimes.com are both very information-dense, with a lot of text on the page.

And these are the cherry-picked examples that this very article chose.

Here are some other sites that are among the most popular in Japan:

- http://naver.jp - Clean, Google-like simplicity

- http://www.ameba.jp/ - Very common splash page style front page, and inside is a very busy social-network-like page, but not really that much different from Facebook, except the ads are a bit more tastefully done.

- http://www.nifty.com/ - Yahoo-like portal

Do these sites really look that different to you? If your answer is yes, I'm going to guess that you probably don't read Japanese, and that it being an unfamiliar jumble of characters is what makes it look weird/different/intimidating. Look past that, though, and you'll see that the similar sites ended up at a similar conclusion, even if aren't mirror images.

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