

Japanese Animation and Video Game Website Layouts - jakerocheleau
http://designm.ag/inspiration/45-japanese-animation-videogame-layouts/

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furtivefelon
It's all games, western games are also much more graphically intensive:
<http://www.battlefield.com/battlefield3> <http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/>
<http://us.battle.net/wow/en/> <http://www.callofduty.com/mw3>

Not too sure why this surprises anyone...

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btn
Indeed. Comparable sites (video games, video game companies, and TV shows) in
English follow very similar design patterns.

That said, there are some major Japanese sites with absolutely mind-boggling
design ("Rakuten" springs to mind...)

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valgaze
Interesting samples & discussion on (sometimes "busy" & hectic) Japanese web
design: [http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/07/25/1712256/the-
puzzle-o...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/07/25/1712256/the-puzzle-of-
japanese-web-design)

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mathrawka
One key difference about web design in Japan versus the US is that Japanese
consumers feel more secure with a lot of text on a page.

Here is a good example of how you need to have different designs based on your
target audience:

<http://www.chatwork.com/ja/>

<http://www.chatwork.com/en/>

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angersock
Opened the first one and was like "Wow, TLDR the template."

I wonder how dense the actual verbage is, in the original. For example, I know
that localization to German from English can be a real pain; as an example,
game developers will find UI elements for menus no longer can contain the long
words that their old titles translate into.

For anyone that reads Japanese, is this page actually saying a lot, or is the
language just taking that long to encode a word/concept?

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snogglethorpe
As btn said, the Japanese page is "flatter", there's more information directly
on the page, things are stated more explicitly, with fewer abbreviated forms
and much less stuff hidden behind tabs or links.

In general, however, I think Japanese tends to be a fair bit more information-
dense than English for a given amount of space/characters. It can vary
greatly, depending, for instance, how polite you're trying to be, how many
foreign words you use, etc, but the ideographic core is very, very, dense
compared to English.

[A point driven home by trying to write text messages in Japanese versus
English... my experience is that it's _much_ harder to cram in what you want
to say into the given limits (~160 bytes) in English, despite Japanese
characters using multiple bytes each...]

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jakerocheleau
I've never considered the texting issue with limited characters. It must be
the same with tweeting in Japanese vs English characters, too.

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snogglethorpe
The interesting thing about Twitter is that the length limit is artificial (as
opposed to text messages where I gather it's more a fundamental limitation of
some underlying protocol), and it will allow you 140 characters regardless of
how many bytes each character uses. So one can actually pack quite a bit into
a tweet using CJK languages.

My observation is that English tweets tend to be a single sentence or at most
two, maybe with some tags on the end, but Japanese tweets are often complete
paragraphs with 4 or more sentences, sometimes more like little mini-
essays—and I hear Chinese tweets can border on the epic...

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msc-o
it's interesting how it's the complete opposite of what japanese design is
known for...clean minimalism.

but I find that the marketing in Japan tends to reflect the emotions that are
generally repressed in their daily lives. the beer ads for example are
colorful and wild with joy...imho.

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newman314
There's also <http://www.dannychoo.com/> aka that Storm Trooper dude...

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fuzzywalrus
Its like web design in reverse...

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jakerocheleau
That's a very eloquent way of putting it :)

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w1ntermute
Do you think these layouts are still used because they're better for the
target audience, or because the Japanese are more averse to change?

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jakerocheleau
I am by no means an expert of Japanese culture. But from what I can tell, web
designers would rather portray the custom animations and glossy menus that you
can only achieve through Flash. That is why so many websites are coded
strangely, and most of the game/anime websites are using a Flash intro.

I think it's a little of both TBH. I do notice that Japanese designs like to
kind of go their own way.

Maybe the Flash layouts are more "exciting" and so it sells more products?
This is a great question. It is understandable that it may be easier to add
custom renders & graphics of the characters. I would love to speak with
somebody from Japan or someone who understands the culture to gauge their
opinion.

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unsignedint
One possibility is that Japan is a country with 2.1% of IE6 users (source:
<http://www.ie6countdown.com/>) might be playing some part of this. (Although,
my hunch is most of that 2.1% are in an office environment...)

Another thing I noticed in years of dealing with Japanese people (although,
I'm from Japan, my time in the US is longer) is they certainly do have some
obsession with grids -- to the extent they make graphing paper out of Excel to
create a document. (Ugh, I hate these documents!) Many of those websites are
table styled as well. (Another pet peeve! Use CSS!)

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w1ntermute
> they make graphing paper out of Excel to create a document

I hate that shit too! They use Excel for the most pointless reasons. I've
gotten all kinds of documents as Excel spreadsheets when a simple word
document would have sufficed.

It might be too much of a stretch, but maybe this has something to do with so
much time spent in childhood writing on 原稿用紙 making Japanese people prefer
"grid-like" organization.

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unsignedint
You have a good point of there. Japanese does not have kerning, so it is the
grid base to begin with.

This and the fact that pictgraphical might be contributing relative acceptance
of more texts.

This is actually funny, as I was constantly making jokes in the past with my
peers, where western people write very comprehensive documents with too much
information, that Japanese counterpart often won't bother reading.

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w1ntermute
> where western people write very comprehensive documents with too much
> information, that Japanese counterpart often won't bother reading.

Yeah, I've run into that problem in the past. I have to make a conscious
effort to simplify anything I write (or say) in English in order to ensure
that Japanese people understand it. They usually won't tell me if they don't
understand something, whereas I'm the opposite when it comes to Japanese, so
that I can optimize my language learning.

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jakerocheleau
> They usually won't tell me if they don't understand something

Why do you think that is? Because I was raised to always ask questions and
learn what you don't understand. I have never really "studied" with a Japanese
friend or colleague so I can't say I've ever had the same experience.

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w1ntermute
The standard explanation is that fear of loss of face[0] makes the Japanese
not want to expose the fact that they don't understand what you're saying (or
have written).

0:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)#Chi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_\(sociological_concept\)#Chinese)
(the Chinese explanation also largely applies to Japan)

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angersock
Not going to lie...this is so much cooler than the boring pastels and
usability-tuned shit we have.

It makes me wish that the frontpage of Amazon or Heroku had more <blink> tags.

EDIT: No, seriously, all the pretty happy colors and little cartoon bros and
errything. It just seems so happy. ^_^

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jakerocheleau
Hey that's Japan for ya!

