The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

by montenegrohugo • 5 months ago

267 119 5 months ago

viggity• 5 months ago

I took 3 years of Japanese in HS (96-99). About 2 years ago I was doing a lot of work with genai and japanese typefaces. It was wild digging into how different the japanese web is. Back in like 2005, it was common to stylize english text by embedding it in an image and then applying drop shadows, etc. By 2022 everyone does the vast majority of that within CSS. Not in Japan though, I couldn't believe how much text content is still in image form.

klez• 5 months ago

I believe this is a continuation of her video on the same topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ . It's been on my to-watch list for a while. I guess it's time to check it out.

xp84• 5 months ago

I personally think it’s a feature and not a bug that web minimalism didn’t impact Japan in the same way it did here in the West. Giant images everywhere, and hiding most complexity behind the ubiquitous ••• buttons, is hostile to discoverability and usability. Our motto: “Hide everything that isn’t specifically earning money, or vitally important to the funnel to maximize our KPI!”

I’m not pretending to understand the why better than the author of this piece - just saying I’m happy for Japan.

cosmic_cheese2• 5 months ago

The sooner three-dot and hamburger menus fall out of favor the better. They're a couple of those UI patterns where 8-9 times out of 10 there was probably a more suitable pattern that should've been used instead.

ctmnt• 5 months ago

I agree that they’re bad patterns (the three dot menu particularly so, it often just looks like a mistake), but what would be more functional on a small screen? I’d love to see some good alternatives that I could adopt in my own projects.

Nifty3929• 5 months ago

Hidden / disappearing controls are so irritating!

Where's the button? Where's the button? I know it must be here somewhere... (accidentally hovering mouse over something) OH THERE IT IS!!

montenegrohugo• 5 months ago

I found this gem. Hadn't seen it on HN yet, so I thought I'd post it!

I've always found Japanese design fascinating

iamnothere2• 5 months ago

I prefer the Japanese style. Information dense, yet clean. It reminds me of the web before Apple-style minimalism took over.

To contrast with a superficially similar style, Chinese web stores are also maximalist, but they tend to assault you with popup coupons, confetti effects, and other such things. Japanese style feels very efficient and utilitarian by comparison.

mc32• 5 months ago

It reminds me of the “portal” era of Netscape, Excite and Yahoo. Very information dense. Among others’, Google’s minimalism took over.

iamnothere2• 5 months ago

There are still a few information dense English language sites out there, but they’re rarer. Honorable mentions:

- https://based.cooking/ (or the more updated fork https://publicdomainrecipes.com/)

- https://ooh.directory/

- https://gwern.net/

- https://www.metafilter.com/

- HN :)

(These are primarily text and lack the occasional color pop of the Japanese style, but I still admire the density and efficiency.)

deltoidmaximus• 5 months ago

I felt like part of Google's success was that the simple search bar loaded fast in an era where I often had slow internet. Yahoo's portal page had to much on it to distract or slow me down from doing what I came there to do.

Later on I remember finding out Yahoo had a search.yahoo.com page or something that was also just a search bar but that was harder to type so was still a failure of design.

This was before combined search and address bar.

awad• 5 months ago

It would not surprise me that Yahoo Japan was the blueprint for many of these sites. It still is extremely popular as a portal destination.

kccqzy• 5 months ago

I think you made a good observation about what’s in essence different between the Chinese style and the Japanese style. The popup coupons and confetti effects are all animations. Personally I find these animations highly distracting. Whereas if something is information dense but static, I like it.

(There are also non-store Chinese designs; they are not trying to sell anything so they don’t need coupons and confettis. These are actually enjoyable to use. And they are more information dense than the English equivalent because the Chinese script packs more in a smaller space. This of course makes such designs i18n-hostile.)

xattt• 5 months ago

They feel like paper catalogues!

torgoguys• 5 months ago

Yes, this was the portal style and I still adore it and use it myself, where I can. As long as the page has a scannable information hierarchy, information dense sites are better when you just want to get stuff done (/look stuff up), which for me is most of the time. I don't care about the fluff and "hero images" and the rest.

BitwiseFool• 5 months ago

"It reminds me of the web before Apple-style minimalism took over."

The loss of color and texture is my biggest gripe. So many webpages and user interfaces abandoned the idea of distinguishing components using different colors and just went with making the page as close to bleach white as possible. I suppose an upside of this is that it made dark-mode easier to adopt. That being said, good dark mode support seems relatively recent.

a4564632• 5 months ago

And now all AI slop coded by anyone is that. Tell tale signs: AI likes to make cards, implement SVGs by hand, all cards have a left hihghlight border, off center font spacing, badges and notification icons, etc.

GaryBluto• 5 months ago

Apple-style minimalism took over.

To be fair, it was Microsoft-style minimalism that Jony Ive brought to Apple, who then popularized it.

pezezin3• 5 months ago

Do you actually use Japanese websites on frequently? Because I do live in Japan, and I hate their websites with a passion. Go use any Japanese online shop; the purchase flows are usually absurdly convoluted, and they are so information dense that sometimes you don't know what you are actually going to purchase. It is one of the reasons I rarely use Rakuten anymore...

shiroiuma2• 5 months ago

Yeah, I hate to say it, but using Amazon.co.jp is SO refreshing after using a Japanese website. It's really unbelievable how bad most Japanese e-commerce sites are.

trashb• 5 months ago

I think there are some important points missing.

Japanese society can adopt things fast the "keitai denwa" where created and adopted earlier than anywhere in the world but in 2025 most companies still use fax machines. The japanese society seems to have different citeria for adoption and depreciation of technology (compared to the west).

When considering web layout you have to consider traditional media layout for example magazines, newspapers, books, flyers or comics. With the japanese language it is possible to layout your articles (text) in different directions left-to-right, top-to-bottom and top-to-bottom, right-to-left. Magazines are read from (western)back to front. Basically there is more flexibility in layout compared to other languages but translating that tradition to the web is difficult today and historically was very difficult.

Most visited websites are news pages, those will be layed out more similar to a traditional newspaper. In japan they often adopted a column layout where in the west we adopted a more list like (row layout) format.

As stated in the article CJK characters are problematic, however the japanese text especially is confusing (because they tried to solve it early on) on the encoding side as there are a few standards that don't cooperate. Especially on the early internet due to technical limitations and a fractured technology landscape (different devices, and operating systems). Therefore a lot of websites that wanted more advanced layouts opted for (and still do) publishing images embedded in html for more advanced font and layouts.

Also most japanese primarily visit japanese language text websites and therefore don't come in contact with the western website design styles very often. A lot of non English speaking countries have this however in japan it is common because of the relative cultural separation. Most japanese just don't interact with companies people or media outside of japan often, a huge part of this is because they are a first world country that has a very low English proficiency. leading to the two styles evolving independently.

rolymath2• 5 months ago

I think the answer is more obvious: The average Japanese web designer doesn't assume his user is an idiot, while western design is more condescending

carlosjobim3• 5 months ago

A potential customer who is a non-idiot will be able to work around idiotic business practices, while a potential customer who is an idiot won't be able to work around good business practices.

Hence, you grab more customers by catering to idiots. Unless you as a business want to avoid these clients.

rolymath2• 5 months ago

Disagree.

Idiot design means more steps for non idiots (see: terminal vs GUI)

esafak• 5 months ago

I don't like it. I feel like every element in the page is shouting at me, abandoning any notion of visual hierarchy. I wonder how Japanese designers regard that concept.

The funny thing is, Western minimalism is strongly influenced by Zen, which is diametrically opposed to this.

matthewkayin• 5 months ago

I respectfully disagree. If you compare the western designs in the article to the Japanese ones, the western designs have these giant banners and images that insist on themselves. Those are the ones that are shouting. It's like the Japanese pages are presenting information and the western pages are trying to be highway ad banners.

doodaddy• 5 months ago

This goes beyond just web design. In Japan, UIs in general steer toward being information dense. At first glance they look positively ancient. And while they take some time to become familiar they seem to be first and foremost, functional. Frankly I wish we in the west would focus more on function and sticking with it instead of hopping to whatever the UI/UX trend of the day is. It seems to me that the more focus there is on UI/UX the worse the experience gets.

m4rtink3• 5 months ago

Yeah! I am using renshuu[0] to learn Japanese and the UI totally bombards you with information - reading, pronunciation, example sentences, additional information sources, mnemotechnical hints from the community, etc.

Not to mention there being an insane amount of ways you can learn, word games, achievements and even a virtual Japanese garden you can populate with items and animals you unlock as you progress in your studies. :)

And I love it! It works so much better for me to learn the words and characters that way, possibly due to all the added context. Its just so much better than "western" minimalistic learning tools and bland apps in general. :)

[0] https://www.renshuu.org/

tshaddox• 5 months ago

While the nation is known abroad for minimalist lifestyles, their websites are oddly maximalist.

I’m not aware of this stereotype of Japanese minimalism. I guess there’s Marie Kondo, and some Japanese high-end dining tends towards minimalism. But then there’s manga, anime, kawaii, Nintendo, Sega, Miyazaki, etc., a lot of which is closer to maximalism than minimalism.

m4rtink3• 5 months ago

Do not forget the Tokugawa tomb in Nikko. ;-)

Cpoll• 5 months ago

You also have wabi-sabi and all the other bits of Zen Buddhism we've imported.

ghaff• 5 months ago

Having attended a lot of conferences in Japan, I would have said signage and the like tends towards the amateur and garish. Which isn't inconsistent with what you wrote. I've always found Japan a weird mix of refined/minimalist and kitsch.

pezezin3• 5 months ago

I read a description somewhere that I loved: the Japanese have a very refined sense of beauty, but no sense of ugliness.

flakiness• 5 months ago

A subset of Japanese people use minimalism as a justification as lesser purchase power these days.

That said, I think the Japanese commercial ecosystem is still less wasteful than the one in the US except the excessive plastic wrapping. I hope one day they realize that won't count as "Omotenashi".

CuriouslyC• 5 months ago

Fruit would like a word

m4rtink3• 5 months ago

I think a lot of what looks like to much wrapping can be explained by high humidity year round. The wrapping protects products from spoiling or being damaged in such an environment.

numpad02• 5 months ago

Wet Japanese climate necessitate sterile packaging. It's not as extreme as the Southeast Asia, but things do get soggy in matters of hours. So "excessive" aluminized plastic wrapping is just a necessity.

rickcarlino2• 5 months ago

Are westerners entering a period of “minimalism fatigue”? Anecdotally it seems like color and texture are slowly taking hold in designs, especially in works targeting a younger demographic.

Example: liquid glass, anything published by Taco Bell, the meme of making sites look like they came from Geocities in 99, etc...

Cthulhu_• 5 months ago

Maybe it's just a slow design trend, these things come and go.

WD-423• 5 months ago

I hope so. I fancy myself pretty decent at reading. I see the Japanese sites and marvel at the amount of information they have available at a glance. I’m so sick of having to scroll 5 page lengths on western sites just to get to any meaningful information.

gdubs• 5 months ago

I'd say more of a rejection of a certain kind of millennial Instagram scented candle branding minimalism.

mghackerlady• 5 months ago

I know I certainly am. I hope we move towards things having colors other than white and black again. Please give me back grey backgrounds, I don't like the blinding whites everything has but dark mode is horrid when you aren't in a dark-ish environment

thewebguyd3• 5 months ago

I hope so. I never bought into the minimalism/flat design hype and have lamented its loss ever since.

What’s worse is it bled out of the digital world and into the physical. There’s a real lack of color in our modern world, at least over here in the US. Everything is so neutral and boring, all in the name of efficiency.

anal_reactor2• 5 months ago

Minimalism does have its merits though. When decorating my apartment I looked for ways to use color without making whole thing look like confetti poop.

rickcarlino2• 5 months ago

And while they are at it, I hope they give us our scrollbars back. They seem to shrink by one pixel every year...

ghusto• 5 months ago

Hopefully. Everyone copied Apple without pausing to consider; "hey, does this make things _less_ usable?". Hint: yes, yes it does.

WorldPeas• 5 months ago

And now they're following Apple into maximalism again making it even less usable. As someone who did accessibility, minimalism did make it easier, it's hard to do maximalism right, one needs to use component extension and extensive styling rules for overlaps and bounding boxes versus a simple vector rectangle with revolved corners. I do miss the 2000s steel/gradient/font/faux 3d icewm-ish looks, they were pretty easy to pull off and didn't really hinder usability

eudamoniac• 5 months ago

I think it's more of a grey/beige fatigue.

usui3• 5 months ago

I read this piece when it came out in 2022. Maybe it should be marked with "(2022)". Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146

I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a range of timezones or 24/7 availability (unless there is a pre-announced downtime that exists as a one-off thing). I know at least three websites off the top of my head that go down for "maintenance" at an exact scheduled time for hours every day, assuming that users would never want to access them overseas during those times (actually, one of those three doesn't even announce the reason, it just returns "server failed to respond" errors until it's time to "open up" for business again). Many services work fine, but at least a quarter to a half of Japanese web services are awful even though they eventually work if you can strangle yourself into making it work. The floor for Japanese web services is way below the floor for American ones. Those sites can get really mindnumbingly bad both on the front end and back end. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it must be a variety of factors. If tech-savvy users can't even make it work, I feel really bad for the struggling elders forced to use those sites.

abustamam3• 5 months ago

A pet peeve of mine — undated blogs :(

Jn2G3Np8• 5 months ago

I found this out when buying a Japan Rail Pass for a trip a few years ago, blew my mind.

https://www.japanrailpass-reservation.net/ only works 4:00–23:30 Japan time.

usui3• 5 months ago

Yeah this is probably downstream of the fact that if you visit any of the individual JR sites from the expandable map at the bottom, you'll discover they're all down at this time as well. Let's scrap the website and make a staffed phone line or fax machine with operating hours.

fsh2• 5 months ago

This is especially funny since the JR Pass cannot be purchased by residents of Japan.

cedws• 5 months ago

I've also had issues topping up my (virtual) Suica card late at night before.

windows2020• 5 months ago

Maybe that's when they run all those crazy legacy jobs, but they politely shut the site down for it.

WD-423• 5 months ago

Anyone who has attempted to play Final Fantasy XIV beyond the free trial has experienced this. Their subscription management web app is so incredibly bad it takes a significant amount of time and effort just to purchase a subscription. I wonder how much revenue they lose simply from people giving up.

BariumBlue• 5 months ago

I was bored and tried playing FF14 about a year ago. You need to do the usual download a launcher to download the game, fine. It asks you to log in before it'll download, fine. It crashes ~10% of the way through downloading the game. Not great but you can make it by restarting the launcher and trying again. And again and again, about a dozen times. It does eventually finish though, and I did almost successfully make a character. Except after making my character you have to choose a server instance - and every single instance in the NA server I could find was "full". I don't know if it was actually full or erroring but I gave up at that point.

The buttonology is cryptic. Like you asked tasked enterprise java devs to write frontend in jquery.

At least that's how I remember it. Game might be fun, but I'll never know.

abustamam3• 5 months ago

I was wondering why the process was so convoluted. I thought it was because I was doing it from my phone and they just had a poor mobile site. Well, apparently they have a poor desktop site that has poor mobile support!

bigstrat2003• 5 months ago

Let me tell you, as bad as the FF14 subscription process is, it's nothing compared to what they had for FF11 back in the day. We have it good!

bandrami2• 5 months ago

The US Social Security Administration website is available from 6am to 8pm, Monday to Friday (or at least it was that way a few years ago)

shakna• 5 months ago

The service hours seem a bit wider nowadays [0], but not 24/7.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/myssa-static/rel_1.0/offHoursPopup.html

mananaysiempre• 5 months ago

I’ve heard such things in the US were because of accessibility law that required the website (for the general population) to work no better than the associated call center (for the people who can’t interact with the website for whatever reason).

On one hand, that seems obviously stupid. On the other, I don’t see how you could phrase a legal requirement of this nature.

nekooooo• 5 months ago

if you're talking about the train booking site going down -- struggling elders are still using the face to face or phone support. they probably have never made an online reservation.

multjoy• 5 months ago

The UK driving licence authority (DVLA) also has a period in which you can’t conduct a range of transactions overnight, but that’s because it interfaces with systems that still run batch jobs overnight and the cost of making it all 24/7 simply wasn’t worth it considering the demand.

pixl97• 5 months ago

Really having common maintenance windows makes things way easier. If you already have a service with a limited geographical range its not bad.

vimda• 5 months ago

A lot of Japanese websites also have to be tremendously over provisioned because of how regimented the country is. A friend of mine worked infrastructure for a local newspaper, and every day at 6PM they'd send a push notification to all their subscribers and had to provision for that peak. When he asked if they could smooth out traffic, send the notification to some folks a minute before, or a minute after he was almost thrown out of the room. "Japan runs on time. Not a minute early, not a minute late. On time".

ezoe• 5 months ago

Probably the old habit of batch processing.

bryanrasmussen• 5 months ago

this is also relatively common in Denmark, at least for government sites. One common thing you see (saw, haven't noticed in the last couple years) in Danish .gov sites is queuing where you need to wait some time before you are allowed in to use a site.

Multicomp• 5 months ago

I forget if it was Samsung or Sony, but somewhere along the way on my internet journey, someone claimed, without evidence, and thus I have none either, that the incentive structure for having prestige jobs at large technology companies was always in hardware design and software was seen as easier and more low class.

So since nobody will get any promotions for running good software, they are not incentivized to run good software, and therefore they do just enough to get by?

ghosty141• 5 months ago

This was and partly is the attitude you can find in german non-software businesses where software is gaining more and more influenxe. For example car manufacturing.

usui3• 5 months ago

Yes this is true and it might possibly be true for the rest of East Asia though I'm not sure. Software is considered intangible and thus low value that anyone can do, whereas hardware is a real "thing" that you can hold in your hands, and is therefore more prestigious. Well, this way of thinking has made things into the current state.

shiroiuma2• 5 months ago

This is historically the reason software engineering in Japan has lagged and there's such a talent shortage (leading companies like mine to hire mostly foreign software engineers). I've heard it's changing, but it'll take a long time to catch up.

socalgal2• 5 months ago

One of the worst sites in existence is the Japanese Visa site they direct people to to make QR codes for when you land in Japan as a tourist. It's atrocious.

https://services.digital.go.jp/en/visit-japan-web/

I hate it so much I kind of wish I could volunteer to fix it. I suspect the process though would be torture

Note: experience on mobile is bad. I don't remember if desktop is better.

pezezin3• 5 months ago

I live in Japan and every time I go through the airport I refuse to use the QR code customs forms, the old paper based form is so much easier...

corranh• 5 months ago

Getting ready for a trip to Japan, I spent an embarrassing amount of time troubleshooting failures to load a Suica (train/transit) NFC card on a phone before realizing it just doesn’t work a few hours a night Tokyo time.

art0rz• 5 months ago

The Suica app doesn't even work on my Pixel 10 Pro, since it requires an Android phone with some sort of Japan-specific hardware (FeliCa/Osaifu-Keitai technology, whatever that is, I'm assuming some special NFC or secure enclave sort of thing).

resoluteteeth• 5 months ago

That page is a few years old and it's much less the case now, which seems to disprove most of the broad cultural conclusions people are trying to draw based on it.

gRoberts84• 5 months ago

https://museum.lingscars.com/

The company was well known amongst the web development industry, as it was often referenced at colleges and universities.

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

Some previous discussion:

2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146

juniperus• 5 months ago

Have you seen a japanese newspaper? the characters alone are very information dense. and a newspaper front page can be very information dense just by the nature of the language/writing system.

otherwise, a lot of japanese webpages just seem impossible to navigate to me. Some images are clickable, some aren't, you still have to scroll to reach where you're going. It's just a bit like a maze, and a lot of what you see is kind of useless.

BalinKing• 5 months ago

To be fair, Japanese headlines use a specific writing style that is much more compressed than normal text, like how English newspaper headlines drop words like “a” or “is” to save space.

Ashken• 5 months ago

Here’s the YT video if anyone is interested:

https://youtu.be/z6ep308goxQ?si=uQNHIxnRpufWJjAF

qoez• 5 months ago

Makes me think that mass analysis of archive.org websites (on a much larger scale than 2000 sites) for color distribution from screenshots or other stuff like this is a cool project ripe for picking.

psygn89• 5 months ago

Having lived in Japan it feels they either they go all in on minimalist or maximalist. Some stores are quiet, others are obnoxiously loud and brightly lit to where you don't see your own shadow. Some magazines have a ridiculous amount of text on the cover, distorting the characters to fit with bold text stroking, others especially fashion might have one line if any at all alongside their logo. Game and book covers can be more on artistic/subtle side whereas in the west we often fight for your attention with character collages or action scenes.

p_j_w2• 5 months ago

others are obnoxiously loud and brightly lit to where you don't see your own shadow.

The name Don Quixote now triggers a PTSD reaction in me.

tobinfekkes• 5 months ago

I just landed in Tokyo for the first time last night and ended up in the Don Quixote in Shibuya by accident (or adventure). What an experience! It's an invasion of all the senses!

seanmcdirmid2• 5 months ago

MUJI vs Loft is my favorite example. How could two stores be so different in design language.

sheept• 5 months ago

I think to figure out if it's a cultural difference or unwillingness for technological change, it'd be interesting to compare Korean or better yet Chinese apps, which were designed more recently.

In my brief experience,

- Promotional websites (e.g. https://ant.design/index-cn, https://seed.bytedance.com/zh/seedream4_0) seem to be designed similarly to Western websites

- Chinese mobile apps do seem to be more colorful in general (as observed with Japanese websites in the article), and some are more information dense, like Douyin Shop and Live. Bullet comments also add to the density

- I briefly worked at TikTok US, where the company uses Lark Suite. The desktop and mobile interfaces look pretty similar to Notion/Slack, but it has more vibrant colors and slightly more features (being an everything app for the workspace)

numpad02• 5 months ago

One thing I haven't seen mentioned on topics regarding this phenomenon: Japanese gambling places(pachinko parlors) appear to be more loud and obnoxious than their Western counterparts.

I mean, it's literally* gambling, so both are supposed to be maximally obnoxious. There aren't supposed to be differences. Yet there appear to be.

And that makes me think that there might be just differences in dopamine resistance between two cultures or something. Like people just take higher doses. I don't think that'll be a crazy concept considering that typical ABVs of hard drinks vary by regions.

Liftyee• 5 months ago

It matches the design of Japanese mainstream shops. Look up images for "Japanese drugstore" to see what I mean here.

pmdr• 5 months ago

A website that's useful should look like Japanese websites look today. Most websites looked like that pre-2010. We just went overboard with making them "responsive." Why do we need >36px text on the desktop for anything other than the main title? I swear we're all getting osteoarthritis from nonstop scrolling.

underlines• 5 months ago

The reposts go on and on, while Japanese web design stays the same

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523955

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35209424

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16272392

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8975735

codethief• 5 months ago

The article shared here seems to be a 2022 follow-up of sorts to the original blog post from 2013 that your links reference.

elicash• 5 months ago

What I'd add to this discussion is that a minimalist website looks HIGHER END, in the same way that a clothing store that's packed with clothing looks cheaper than a store that has like 10 dresses and tons of empty space.

Depending on the brand, you might want to appear like a good bargain! Alternatively, you might want to appear like you sell luxury items. But either way, the design is communicating something.

sdn90• 5 months ago

I'm an American that has been living in Asia for a years.

I actually hated the web design at first but now I much prefer it and find it difficult to use American apps with the modern tech aesthetic now.

I noticed that I started to get annoyed doing things like filling forms. I feel like American apps tend to reduce complex flows into simpler decisions but requiring more steps. It feels like my brain is wired to want to see as much information at once now.

shawn_w• 5 months ago

Speaking of design, I absolutely cannot stand the font used in TFA. Especially the lower case f. It's actually painful to look at.

mbo2• 5 months ago

I have a little theory that a thing that makes Japanese website feel Japanese is their choice of typeface, which will almost always be something with robust CJK character support. This typeface is preserved when Chrome auto-translates the site.

But fonts with good CJK support have wider Latin letter-forms, even when not in `font-variant-east-asian: 'full-width'` mode. I write about this here: https://maxbo.me/subordinate-latin.html (and cite "the peculiar case of Japanese web design")

adzm• 5 months ago

Is there a reason why several typefaces on your site appear to be hello Kitty glyphs?

mbo2• 5 months ago

That's the fallback font when the font that is requested is not available locally (and the license doesn't permit them to be redistributed). I wanted it to be visually obvious.

theflyestpilot• 5 months ago

Chinese web design also interesting

Izkata• 5 months ago

About halfway down the page (look for "revolutiooon") there's some example images that seem to be meant to show how Japan didn't change around 2010 while the rest of the world did. Except the "American" set of images also show that we didn't really change either. Were those supposed to be different images?

nottorp• 5 months ago

It looks better than the usual solo founder saas that has 2 words per screen and infinitely scrolls to be honest.

jp1016• 5 months ago

The technology argument is the most convincing one to me. I worked with a Japanese client a few years ago and the internal tools they used were wild by western standards. Like full-on frameset layouts in 2020. But it wasn't ignorance, it was continuity. The tools worked, people knew how to use them, and there was zero appetite for redesigning something that wasn't broken.

The font thing is also underrated as a factor. When you only have a handful of web-safe CJK fonts and you can't rely on weight/size variations to create hierarchy the way you can with Latin text, you compensate with color and density. It's a constraint that pushes you toward a specific aesthetic whether you want it or not.

I think the framing of "peculiar" is a bit western-centric though. Dense information-heavy pages are arguably more respectful of the user's time than the trend of spreading three sentences across five viewport-heights of whitespace.

a4564632• 5 months ago

Japan is "old" But old is not bad. The VC and SV fetish of new just so that can steal people's money needs to get old, by that token

casey2• 5 months ago

Japan is a highly literate population, so anybody using a Japanese website can read Japanese. Literacy among the English speaking world is much poorer. Growth metrics push large companies into minimalist design for both habit forming and accessibility reasons.

Most of the sites shown are the equivalent of a weekly ad. You have an interest cut off, and you show that limited set of information. Since Japan is a very "low trust" society I'd assume most people just think minimalist sites look like a scam startup venture.

The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

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