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Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

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Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#41

Post by incision »

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.

Exactly.

The author is conflating two things which don't necessarily have any bearing on each other - equating fickle trends in design to mastery.

Flat icons, low-contrast fonts, parallax scrolls or whatever else are not necessarily an evolution in, much less mastery of web design.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#42

Post by ANTSANTS »

na85 wrote: post #33
MichaelTieso wrote: post #23

There's actually some truth to this that is missing in the article. I had lived in China for awhile and it was so incredibly difficult to navigate Chinese websites. I'm using China as an example because the web designs are similar. There was some study done awhile ago within China that I can't find the link to that compared the designs of a complicated site like sina.com.cn with text and images all over the place and…

Would you mind linking to that graphic?

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=yang+liu+east+meets+west

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#43

Post by twic »

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…

I've heard it observed before that current generations will assume this meant that the sky was blue, or perhaps black, that being what many televisions display when 'tuned' to an inactive input.

Before i got to your comment, reading the grandparent about this being a 1980s future immediately put me in mind of something else William Gibson said in ~1993:

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed"

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#44

Post by hsitz »

DanI-S wrote: post #26

> "Walking around Tokyo, I often get the feeling of being stuck in a 1980′s vision of the future" I'm British, living in the US, and I've always felt this way about America. I recently heard from an American friend that he felt exactly the same when visiting Britain. Not sure what to make of it, but it's interesting!

"I recently heard from an American friend that he felt exactly the same when visiting Britain."

The "same", meaning he felt like Britain was stuck in 1980's version of the future? Or the past? Strange, my experience and I think the usual experience of Americans visiting GB/Europe is of feeling like you've timewarped into the past. How far depends on where you visit. Paris/London may feel twenty years back, other places fifty or a hundred.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#45

Post by yiransheng »

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…

- Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable spaaaaaace, 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 second this theory. A similar version of this happened in China too. A few years back, when Baidu was still copying Google's minimal design pixel by pixel, they suddenly discovered that it was losing traffic to a random site with only one static html page setup: hao123, which also fit into the 'cluttered, link-rich' interface category. Baidu ended up acquiring hao123, spending close to a million dollars on a few lines of html. Note that Chinese language bears quite some similarities to Japanese, they are both character based and typically a hassle to type in large chunks.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#46

Post by School-Cotton »

OMBUG wrote: post #36
iambateman wrote: post #19

Ok, 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 thei…

You don't need to imagine: http://www.amazon.cn/

You're assuming that Amazon doesn't design things any differently for their Chinese site vs. their US site.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#47

Post by joyeuse6701 »

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.

Arguable, some things cease to be a trend and really end up being classic design, and thus, timeless.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#48

Post by redthrowaway »

twic wrote: post #43
redthrowaway wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've heard it observed before that current generations will assume this meant that the sky was blue, or perhaps black, that being what many televisions display when 'tuned' to an inactive input. Before i got to your comment, reading the grandparent about this being a 1980s future immediately put me in mind of something else William Gibson said in ~1993: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distribu…

I like to think they'd envision a big blue box stretched across the sky, with the words "This channel only available to premium subscribers." If nothing else, it'd capture the cyberpunk aesthetic nicely.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#49

Post by darklajid »

helipad wrote: post #2

There are good points made here. I suspect there's also a bit of herding going on. In Germany, for example, it's pretty easy to find major websites which are fixed-width, left aligned and looking dated. There's no real geographic or historical reason for how it is, other than the fact that their neighbours have a similar style. In a similar vein, many startups have similar designs. Even on the Internet, where you can…

I agree - this is 'culture'.

If I look at these sites (picked because I have seen them in use, because I know they're 'important'), I'm having trouble understanding the design decisions as well

http://www.ynet.co.il/

http://hot.co.il/

So .. isn't this just these sites catering to their local culture? Who cares about people from overseas shaking their head?

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#50

Post by anigbrowl »

leokun wrote: post #11

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…

That's a good thing. I am sick of lots of space and less content - I I go to websites to read things, not just look at them. A lot of minimalist websites are pretty in the abstract but unfriendly towards potential customers by withholding information or making users jump through hoops to get to it.
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