> This is a beautiful looking site but is decidedly designed for Japanese readers.
Well, yeah, it's a site in Japanese with specifically Japanese subject matter, why is that a problem?
> I will leave cultural commentary aside. While the romanized names are large, they are incredibly awkward to read being rendered vertically with rotation
IMO, vertically-with-rotation is fine, probably even ideal, for reading the romanized text given the rest of the design, which presumably is appropriate for the main target audience.
The only real readability problem I see is that the text color doesn't change for contrast with the background color.
> I would recommend rendering the romanji vertically without rotation
Please don't. Consistently rotated context is easier to read as words than vertical words of horizontal letters.
> or using a Western left-to-right rendering
That's done for the Romanized text where space permits (e.g., for the selected color in the right-side banner.) But unless you are suggesting that the site should be designed first and foremost for Westerners, I don't see any more of that as reasonable.
> IMO, vertically-with-rotation is fine, probably even ideal, for reading the romanized text given the rest of the design, which presumably is appropriate for the main target audience.
I'm soso with the rotated text but the font choice just compounds the readability issue. the lines are so thin that, when rotated, they just become overly antialiased.
That being said, if you look around you'll basically _never_ see characters from horizontal languages on ANY public billboards that are rotated. They're always vertically oriented letters. While it may work for you personally, graphic designers learned a long time ago that this doesn't work for the general populace.
> people in the English speaking world forget that not everything is optimized for them.
people everywhere forget that not only are there people who process things differently than them, but that on the web we have the technology to accommodate most of those needs.
In this case the whole thing could be rotated one way for folks with their browsers set to a language that is traditionally vertical and another way for folks where their browsers are left-to-right languages, and rotated and flipped for folks with right-to-left languages.
Well, yeah, it's a site in Japanese with specifically Japanese subject matter, why is that a problem?
> I will leave cultural commentary aside. While the romanized names are large, they are incredibly awkward to read being rendered vertically with rotation
IMO, vertically-with-rotation is fine, probably even ideal, for reading the romanized text given the rest of the design, which presumably is appropriate for the main target audience.
The only real readability problem I see is that the text color doesn't change for contrast with the background color.
> I would recommend rendering the romanji vertically without rotation
Please don't. Consistently rotated context is easier to read as words than vertical words of horizontal letters.
> or using a Western left-to-right rendering
That's done for the Romanized text where space permits (e.g., for the selected color in the right-side banner.) But unless you are suggesting that the site should be designed first and foremost for Westerners, I don't see any more of that as reasonable.