It's not just Japan or asian websites. The further away you get from the silicon valley bubble, the more sites look like they are from the late 90's. It's not really even location specific, more how tuned in developers are to the bay area style. You can look at local news papers in the US for example, or even government sites. I think part of the reason is that there's a lot of design talent in the bay area, and the further removed one is from being involved, the less people care about things like flat design and having lots of space and less content, etc.
Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
11–20 of 135 posts
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#12Is there a breakdown somewhere of two distinct groups of human activities: Design where correctness is defined as optimizing some metric goal, like designing an electronic circuit for maximum performance at a fixed price, or the strongest bridge pylon for a fixed cost or perhaps for a fixed concrete volume. vs Design where correctness is defined as a large group of people trying to imitate each other at an optimum di…
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Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#13The 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 limits the opportunities for adding visual punch that you get with latin alphabets
Italics and capital letters have little or nothing to do with how 'Western' web layouts are generally created, and are far from the only way to create emphasis or hierarchy in text.
> Language Barrier... Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted
Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the world? Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? This sounds much more like surface intuition than considered insight
> Risk Avoidance
This might help explain why Japanese websites look similar to each other, but not why they look different from 'Western' websites. You could make a similar claim about big sites like Microsoft and Yahoo that have copied the look an feel of Google, or the mass of slightly-modified Bootstrap-based 'Western' sites. Risk avoidance/copying is universal - it does not explain the difference between Japanese and non-Japanese websites.
> Consumer Behaviour - People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision
Evidence, or is this just a personal observation?
> Advertising – 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
Haven't Google, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, everyone demonstrated that this is the goal of what they're doing? It's not culturally unique.
> Urban Landscape
This has some research to back it up - Nisbett, Masuda, Shah, others
Other claims also read as casual inductive observations that don't hold up to much scrutiny. There probably are very interesting reasons why web design appears to be so culturally influenced, but this article doesn't really elucidate much.
/end rant
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#14I 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'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.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#15Even though there may be a cultural difference, it's not enough. Look at Modern Japanese architecture. There are tons of different styles. Some clean and minimal, others maximal and extremely busy.
Japan is a very pluralistic country and there are going to be all kinds of different styles and personalities there in any field you choose.
My feeling is that big companies take a long time to change design. In the US, sites like the new york times, Dell, yahoo, Ebay, Techcrunch, zappos all had, at one point recently, really old-looking or just plain bad websites.
Even amazon is busted. Try searching for something and navigating to the 10th page of your search results. amazon is a wasteland in terms of usability and design.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#16A 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 modern version of those "me! me! me!" brochures that get shoved in my mailbox every day. So it's natural that they would expect it to look like one.
- Japanese culture is not nearly as minimalist as its made out to be in the West. Minimalism has its place, of course, but in commercial spaces its all about competing for attention, to the point of sensory overload.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#17The 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".
was he talking about theoretical physics vs engineering?
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#18The 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…
Katakana can be used for emphasis much like italics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Usage
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#19Ok, there's some truth to this article, I'm not going to say the author is all wrong, but look at Amazon.com's home page and imagine you couldn't read English.
http://cl.ly/image/2i0r0G091U0P
It would look really jumbled, incoherent, and poorly architected. Given that you can speak English, it's relatively easy to digest the nav, suggested books, ads, etc.
My guess is that there are cultural expectations driving their design choices (particularly in color scheme). But the biggest difference is probably the fact that their type appears impossibly complicated. Nothing more.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#20I 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.. :)
I agree. The design may seem unusual from a Westerner's point of view but from a Japanese prospective, this may fit the bill as a clean, simple design. The same can be said in reverse.
i don't think the design is unusual at all. It's not like i go to theatlantic.com and the first thing i notice is that the design is "unusual." it's just not as "slick" as something like qz.com