
Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different - spinningarrow
http://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different
======
TelmoMenezes
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.

~~~
cclogg
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?).

~~~
toyg
Like "the West" had escaped anything… Justin Bieber? JLS? Even goddamn Take
That are still outselling everyone else except _newer_ manufactured pop acts.

People in glass houses should not throw stones.

~~~
cclogg
Haha sorry my bad, that is definitely true, but I meant the sound of that era,
not boy-bands in general.

------
verisimilidude
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 coders I've met have put in the effort to learn
English. They might not be able to carry fluent geopolitical conversations,
but they do tend to have enough chops to read API docs and skim code. Most of
the Japanese professionals I've met, in any trade, are _ultra professional_ ,
and will do whatever it takes to stay on top of their craft, including
learning English if needed.

2\. It's easy to forget that some of these programming languages, notably
Ruby, are actually from Japan. As recently as a few years ago, some of my
favorite resources for Ruby were in Japanese, out in front of English.

3\. Go to a Japanese bookstore and check out the section for programmers. More
recent web languages/tech, like node.js, are not well represented. But then
look to the next shelf and you'll see something like Unity stacked to the
ceiling. It could be that Japanese coders would rather work on different kinds
of projects, spend their time learning new tech in those domains instead of
the web, and only see the web as a means to an end. I wouldn't consider this a
"language barrier", but rather a difference in priorities.

~~~
pflats
> _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 preferences in web design, mind
you.)

~~~
verisimilidude
Negative. One of the best Japanese coders I know runs his own property
management business, and learned coding (and English) so he can stay on top of
the various stuff he's created in support of his operations.

~~~
resetmp
That's one arbitrary example. It's meaningless if he represents 1 out of a
10000 sample size.

~~~
verisimilidude
It's anecdotal, but dispels the idea that my "sample group" was limited to
career programmers, which was the point in the parent comment.

------
helipad
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 connect with anyone in the world, there's a lot of tending
towards those who are closest to you.

~~~
jjoonathan
Yeah, I suspect this is the major factor. Or maybe I'm just bitter after going
to blender.org this morning and finding that they have ditched their orange-
on-black color scheme for the "white minimalist + photo" style that's all the
rage these days. Bleh.

------
leokun
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
blt
Yeah a lot of websites make you scroll too much. So sick of scrolling like 3
pages to see one sentence slide in from the left in 48 point text.

------
Pitarou
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 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.

~~~
yiransheng
\- 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.

------
DanI-S
> "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!

~~~
pyre
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?

~~~
redthrowaway
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 television, tuned to a dead
channel"

~~~
twic
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"

~~~
redthrowaway
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.

------
minikomi
Good morning from Tokyo! Sites like Rakuten have more to do with in-house
politics than Japanese design trends or a love for information density.
[http://bm.straightline.jp](http://bm.straightline.jp) is a better guage of
where he Japanese web _design_ trends are headed. As you can see, there's a
lot of echoes of flash heavy sites and flat one page designs, but little which
represents the special kind of chaos large bottom up created sites like Yahoo
or Rakuten. They're more akin to the million dollar website than anything
else.

~~~
Pitarou
Thanks for that insightful perspective.

------
VLM
Is 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 distance as close as possible without
introducing legal difficulties with accusations of direct copying and not
failing at user interaction much worse than anyone else.

Web design and most software UI is obviously almost entirely in the latter
category.

A huge source of disaster and trouble is people using language and attitudes
from one category in the other category.

I'm not sure what to google / wikipedia for... this must be well trodden
ground after a couple millenia of ladies high fashion clothing design, for
example.

------
CognitiveLens
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...](http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chinese-or-
english/)

> 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

~~~
pflats
While I agree with the vast majority of your criticisms, I wouldn't be
surprised if you're underestimating the language barrier issue.

> _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?_

Many programming languages are based on English and the Latin script.
Programming, and more specifically web programming, requires a level of
fluency with English and its alphabet that I would expect significantly
decreases the available talent pool in non-Anglo countries, especially
countries with different writing systems[1].

No other technologies lean so heavily a specific language. Math and science
are universal and independent of any language. Computer science is universal.
Computer programming is not.

[1]Comparing a country like Vietnam (that uses a Latin script) to another
equivalent Asian country might be interesting.

~~~
j03w
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 barrier didn't prevent them from having companies like Konami, Square
Enix, Namco, Bandai, Nintendo or Sony then why would it prevents them to have
more web developers?

Ruby was created by a Japanese for that matter.

~~~
uchi
Unsurprisingly, the companies you listed churn out some pretty terrible code.
Square Enix for example has pretty big problems with ffxiv because hacking and
botting is so easy. Maintenance windows have gotten longer and are occurring
more often in an effort to patch vulnerabilities. Just last week players who
were in a specific city accessing their retainers (personal bankers) had their
money flushed from their characters by hackers who compromised the trade
cluster and transfered it to their bots by listing bogus trash items for
millions of gold.

~~~
j03w
Sure, but it's not like companies in western world don't make similar mistake.
WoW/DB3 have plenty of exploits too. Bad code are produced by everyone
regardless the cultural or native language background.

------
iambateman
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](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.

~~~
jinushaun
Not a good example. Amazon.com is famously a jumbled mess.

~~~
notahacker
It's an excellent example; it's directly comparable with the Japanese sites
which are also big legacy companies with a lot of content competing for
attention. It's not as if Amazon is an outlier in design terms amongst major
Western ecommerce or portal sites. _Most_ Yahoo regional sites look a bit like
the Japanese one, although some got round to updating the logo quicker. The US
top sites list boasts portals that are even more text-heavy ike Reddit (and of
course the infamous Craigslist) or noisy like the Huffington Post

Japanese startups, on the other hand, appear to enjoy their SV-style big stock
photos, large bold text and colourful calls to action:
[http://thebridge.jp/en/2013/06/top-50-japanese-
startups](http://thebridge.jp/en/2013/06/top-50-japanese-startups)

------
buster
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.. :)

~~~
ics
Interestingly the information rate of spoken Japanese is comparatively low.

[http://ohll.ish-
lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...](http://ohll.ish-
lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_2011_Language.pdf)

~~~
lovemenot
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishin-denshin)

~~~
ics
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzai)

------
kyrra
Semi-related story. I was doing a fan site for Final Fantasy XIV (mmo from
Square Enix). It's interesting to see how things have to behave differently
when a tech company has to deal with Japanese and English.

For tweets from their marketing department, they would write a tweet in
Japanese first which would fit into a single tweet, but would spill over
between 3 tweets when translated to English.

Within the FFXIV game, they had a chat box (like chat in many MMOs). The input
field for typing in text only allowed 80 or so characters. This was fine for
Japanese, but for English it was extremely limited. They fixed it soon after
release, but it was something the dev team didn't realize as they were all
Japanese.

~~~
hudibras
There was a blog post from James Fallows last year[1] which contained a
English translation of a single Chinese tweet. 140 Chinese characters
transformed into 115 English words with 676 characters.

[1][http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/chi...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/china-
soft-power-watch-the-yang-rui-foreign-bitch-factor/257403/)

------
jebblue
In the first picture I saw border navigation panels and a main center content
area. Why is that "too many columns"? 1998 was a good year, web pages
contained more information, not just text boxes super sized freakishly, low
content, just large massive items on screens which have shrunk vertically the
past several years which is far more of a conundrum to me. Making use of
columns seems to make more sense now than it did in 1998. If anything, the
Japanese are ahead of the curve. If screen sizes start growing vertically
again then I could see your point.

------
doctorstupid
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".

~~~
sanskritabelt
He also said that at least 46 years ago.

------
peterjlee
I feel like the author wrote this article with a bias that Western websites
are better and more aesthetically pleasing because it's simpler. But those are
all subjective matters and Asian users probably prefer what they have. I come
from a Korean background and I visit many different Korean and American
websites daily, including the ones mentioned in the article. While some of the
reasons given may seem plausible, non of them were actually convincing. There
isn't really a solid reason why Asian websites look like that. That's just how
it was and users are familiar with it. Some people like Hacker News because
it's simple, while some people don't like it because it's too simple. There's
no better or worse, it's just a preference.

Also, those patterns are not unique to Asian websites. If you go to cnn.com or
msn.com, they're not that different either.

~~~
lovemenot
The bias you speak about is evident in the article's title. "Why Japanese Web
Design Is So ... Different". The baseline is by implication English design,
since the article was written in English. Probably also some subset of English
sites that the author feels is representative, and expects his/her readers to
resonate with. This is fine, but the problem is that this bias is not made
explicit. It feels a little like asking "why are all these foreigners speaking
funny languages?"

Since Japanese sites apparently look like they have not evolved since they
were last like English sites around 1998, the better question might have been
what factors have been driving evolution of English sites which did not affect
Japanese? You may add other languages, but I'll just stick with Japanese since
it is referenced by the OP.

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

[http://youtube.com](http://youtube.com) (view in incognito if you are signed
into an account [http://nicovideo.jp](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/](http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/) and
[http://newyorktimes.com](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](http://naver.jp) \- Clean, Google-like simplicity

\- [http://www.ameba.jp/](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/](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.

~~~
Pitarou
Re: Yahoo!, I guess you must be in the A group and I must be in the B group,
because on my browser they look very different.

About a year ago, yahoo.com and yahoo.co.jp looked rather different. Yahoo!
Japan's portal was astonishingly cluttered. Then it seems that Yahoo! HQ
cracked the whip and ordered everyone to get in line, so the Japanese site
became more like the US one. Still pretty messy, but nowhere near the sensory
overload levels it reached before.

Now, it looks like Yahoo! have cleaned up their site more, and turned it more
into more of a "What's hot!" portal. But, on my browser, Yahoo! Japan hasn't
changed yet.

Of course, the article is cherry-picking a bit, but I don't think it's being
unfair. Popular Japanese sites, including big e-shops, are garish and
cluttered to a degree that would be unacceptable in the West.

------
jrs99
Even 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.

------
MichaelTieso
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 compared it with a much simpler design that
practiced white space and minimalism. It showed that the Chinese actually
preferred complicated designs over simple designs. Having lived in China, this
makes sense to me because of the culture. Simplicity and white space is not
very well practiced. The "East Meets West" graphic by Yang Liu is probably a
good example of some of the cultural differences.

~~~
na85
Would you mind linking to that graphic?

~~~
ANTSANTS
[http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=yang+liu+east+meets+west](http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=yang+liu+east+meets+west)

~~~
na85
Hey thanks for the link, and for not being a passive-aggressive prick.

~~~
ANTSANTS
Maybe I was a little rude (not quite as rude as calling someone a "passive-
aggressive prick," mind you), but this behavior is annoying. I thought it was
one of the "rules of the internet" or something that you make the bare minimum
of effort to find something yourself before you bother people about it.

------
okonomiyaki3000
"Different" is a very diplomatic way of saying it. Probably better to just
call it what it is: wrong. The link seems to be dead so I haven't even read
the article but I do have some personal experience in the matter.

While there are a bunch of reasons for why it is the way it is, I think a big
part of it is the goddamned Keitai. For a lot of Japanese, the only way they
ever accessed the web was via their mobile phone. Until smartphones, this
meant a very very dumbed down experience. Sadly, even now that smartphones are
prevalent, there's still an attitude of "Let's wait and see if this smartphone
fad keeps up for a while..."

------
candybar
Most of this simply has to do with lack of disruption. Almost all sites tend
to add clutter over time because new things need to be added and some
stakeholders don't want old things removed. Sometimes the only way to get
clean new design is to start over. My guess is that competition has been less
fierce and/or has been won (rigged?) by incumbents more often than it has been
in the US, leading to slower iteration and acceptance of less-than-ideal
design by consumers.

Enterprise versus consumer apps is the same story - lack of disruption and
consumer choice leads to decisions that make sense only to the middlemen.

------
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.

------
Segmentation
Try searching .io domains regionally. You'll find Japan has modern designs out
there.

[https://www.google.com/search?as_q=&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as...](https://www.google.com/search?as_q=&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=lang_ja&cr=countryJP&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=.io&as_occt=any&safe=images&tbs=&as_filetype=&as_rights=)

------
melvinmt
So I don't know what to make of [http://apple.com/jp](http://apple.com/jp)

Is it just cultural ignorance on Apple's behalf or do Japanese people secretly
appreciate this design style (given the popularity of Apple products in
Japan)?

~~~
adamb_
I don't think there's much of a correlation between the rise in popularity of
Apple products in Japan and Apple's Japanese website.

------
grmarcil
To disagree with one of the smaller points in the article: Uniqlo's website is
not a great counterpoint to the trend of bad/outdated web design. I like their
clothing, but their website (although modern looking) is one of the worst user
experiences out there.

Search is an afterthought, and if you want to get to something at the bottom
of a category page, have fun wading through several dynamic sub-category load
times.

------
sliverstorm
To my knowledge, there isn't just a mobile _legacy_ \- the majority of
Japanese still use a phone as their primary internet access device.

------
LiweiZ
One of my guess is that "applization"(I mean a web service becomes more and
more like an app) has its role to play in current simple/clean/flat web design
trend. A more app-like web service is more likely to require the app visual
design. So this could be an interesting perspective to examine the development
status of web design in different parts of the world.

------
smoyer
404 - HN Effect :(

"Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) mod_jk/1.2.25 mod_python/3.3.1 Python/2.5.2
PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.27 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8 Server at randomwire.com Port 80"

If this is your server, you shouldn't be giving so much information away. Make
would-be attackers work a be at enumerating you.

~~~
T-Winsnes
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://randomwire.com/why-
japanese-web-design-is-so-different)

Google captured the page before it went down :)

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bitwize
Japanese web design tends to be broadly reflective of Japanese product
packaging: cram as much textual info as will fit into limited space.

They have a U.S.-sized population and nearly U.S.-sized industrial base
running inside a California-sized archipelago. They've gotten good at making
the most of space.

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J_Darnley
From that one screen shot he provides it looks like the reason the Japanese do
it differently is because they don't assume their visitors are driven off by
masses of text. I wish more websites I use were stuffed full of information
(or what I assume is information) like that.

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joyeuse6701
Bakemonogatari, watch an episode of that and you'll see how creative Japanese
text and design can be. Unfortunately the websites don't follow that trend,
and anime is certainly a creative outlet with significant freedoms. Would be
nice to see a renaissance over there.

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jccalhoun
I find it interesting that a site that is posting about cultural trends is
itself following one of the current western web site trends:narrow central
column of text with tons and tons of empty white space on either side...

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Xelom
Well, their adult content is also pretty different. Think about it.

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zmonkeyz
Interesting article. I really like Microsoft's metro design language but i
often wonder how well it works out for asian languages.

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jmedilou
I would just like to say that Xelom & j03w make the best argumets in this
entire thread...

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VeejayRampay
Wow. So ethnocentrism. Much condescent.

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kome
I agree with you.

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goggles99
_> Windows XP & IE 6 – although the number of people using ancient Microsoft
software is rapidly decreasing there are still a fair number of people using
these dinosaurs, especially in corporate environments. Enough said._

Wow, this is like saying their clothes look different from ours because their
sowing machines are too old. Their hair styles are different because their
scissors have longer blades, their food is different because they use
chopsticks - ETC.

Their web design is different because they are different culturally. Their
tastes and preferences are stylistically different. just because their gardens
are liked in the west, does not mean we like all of their stylistic
preferences. This blog post is completely wrong IMO. "Enough said".

