[HN Gopher] The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)
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The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)
Author : montenegrohugo
Score : 206 points
Date : 2026-02-23 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sabrinas.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (sabrinas.space)
| viggity wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_cheese wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Personally, if they just went away on large screens, I'd
| already be much happier. So many programs I use on my 30"
| monitor have gone from a readily available quick-to-
| navigate menu-bar to a horrible hamburger menu that is so
| self-conscious about using space that it is 10x slower to
| use than before.
|
| Gnome (and maybe GTK as well?) submenus now require a click
| (as opposed to the previous hover) and replace their parent
| menu (rather than appearing beside it), making hunting for
| something in a submenu an exercise in frustration.
| Considering that:
|
| 1. The fraction of Gnome users on a small touchscreen is
| approximately zero
|
| 2. You can always support the miniscule number of small-
| touchscreen users by having menus behave differently on
| small touch screens; Apple still has a menu bar on desktop
| applications!
|
| It's particularly frustrating
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| It's very context-dependent and I can't detail all of them
| in this post but I'll give a couple examples.
|
| In many cases, for mobile versions of sites hamburger menus
| can be easily replaced with an app-style bottom-aligned tab
| bar and on occasion even a linear horizontal navbar. You
| wouldn't believe how many mobile hamburger menus I've seen
| on sites that have a grand total of 2-5 destinations.
|
| In the case of list views, three-dot menus can be replaced
| by a mini-toolbar of buttons that appears within a list
| item when hovering or selecting a row (depending on if it's
| desktop or mobile), and on desktop if your audience has a
| bit of a technical leaning a right-click context menu can
| do the trick.
|
| The main thing to avoid is to use either as thoughtless
| catch-all "junk drawers". Usually if one sits and thinks
| about it a little bit a better pattern will become obvious.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| The alternative is progressive disclosure and contextual
| actions, mostly. Only show buttons and options when they
| are functional (e.g., a fixed bottom nav bar changes to
| copy/cut/paste only when text is selected, otherwise it
| displays nav icons, or changes to something else entirely
| on some other action).
|
| For overflow, have the bottom nav bar slide up (kind of
| like old iOS control center) to reveal more options, just
| have to be cautious not to re-create the three dots menu
| junk drawer in there too.
|
| I think the three-dot menu junk drawer is just a result of
| lazy design from a goal of re-using the same UI everywhere,
| no matter the OS.
|
| If we want good design, then (collective) we need to start
| making unique native UIs per platform, using that
| platform's toolkits and HIG instead of "branded"
| experiences using cross platform UIs.
|
| That's for mobile, for desktop just dump mobile design
| entirely. Go full on information density, menus, etc. Make
| it designed to be navigated with a keyboard and a mouse.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If you don't crowd your menu, then you can just have the
| text links below the website logo, with flex-direction: row
| and justify-content: center
|
| It'll take up less than half of a smart phone screen, and
| customers don't need to bother with any burger menu.
|
| The phone web should only have two functions: Poke and
| scroll. For most normal websites that is.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| iamnothere wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It reminds me of the "portal" era of Netscape, Excite and
| Yahoo. Very information dense. Among others', Google's
| minimalism took over.
| iamnothere wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They feel like paper catalogues!
| torgoguys wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >"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.
| a456463 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Apple-style minimalism took over.
|
| To be fair, it was Microsoft-style minimalism that Jony Ive
| brought to Apple, who then popularized it.
| trashb wrote:
| 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.
| rolymath wrote:
| 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
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| m4rtink wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Do not forget the Tokugawa tomb in Nikko. ;-)
| Cpoll wrote:
| You also have wabi-sabi and all the other bits of Zen Buddhism
| we've imported.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| flakiness wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Fruit would like a word
| m4rtink wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| Maybe it's just a slow design trend, these things come and go.
| WD-42 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'd say more of a rejection of a certain kind of millennial
| Instagram scented candle branding minimalism.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| 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
| thewebguyd wrote:
| 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_reactor wrote:
| 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.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Yeah I'll agree there, as the saying goes "all things in
| moderation." It's when it goes too far is when it starts to
| suck the life and human-ness out of everything.
|
| I suppose my issue is more with _the_ "corporate
| minimalism" trend rather than minimalist design in general.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I think good minimalism is when you express more with
| less. In my living room, the appliances are grey but wall
| artworks are colorful - you immediately look the
| paintings, not at the drawers. The artworks themselves
| aren't colorful, each one has a specific color scheme, so
| that when you take a step back, a pattern emerges, and
| there are gentle but clear color zones that serve
| different purposes. In another area I have space that's
| exclusively grey and white, and then there's one corner
| that's unicorn puke. Minimalism creates lower lows so
| that the highs punch even higher. The house is modern-
| minimalist and you can easily find angles to take photos
| literally from Ikea catalogue, but at the same time it's
| very radical from artistic point of view and nobody who's
| seen my house has said that it looks bland.
|
| The problem with corporate minimalism is that the vague
| nothingness became the goal of the design rather than a
| way to set the scene for something else. It's like asking
| your audience to stop the chatter but then there's no
| show.
| ghusto wrote:
| Hopefully. Everyone copied Apple without pausing to consider;
| "hey, does this make things _less_ usable?". Hint: yes, yes it
| does.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think it's more of a grey/beige fatigue.
| usui wrote:
| 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.
| abustamam wrote:
| A pet peeve of mine -- undated blogs :(
| Jn2G3Np8 wrote:
| 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.
| usui wrote:
| 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.
| fsh wrote:
| Considering the state of japanese IT, there is probably a
| person typing each reservation from the website into a
| 1980s mainframe.
| z2 wrote:
| After receiving the orders that were actually printed
| from an Internet Explorer 6 only website, and faxed over
| from another office before being re-scanned in along with
| a barcode that usually failed to make it over the fax,
| hence the need to hand-type things. True story (not for
| JR specifically, but circa 2013)
| fsh wrote:
| This is especially funny since the JR Pass cannot be
| purchased by residents of Japan.
| cedws wrote:
| I've also had issues topping up my (virtual) Suica card late
| at night before.
| WD-42 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| WD-42 wrote:
| So you didn't even get to the final boss, purchasing a sub.
|
| While I played it I always had this dirty feeling imagining
| what the backend code must look like. Sends chills down my
| spine.
| abustamam wrote:
| I played on my Playstation when I played a few years back,
| fortunately it was a seamless process! As parent comment
| said though, subscription process was almost user hostile
| for some reason.
| abustamam wrote:
| 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!
| bandrami wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| nekooooo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Really having common maintenance windows makes things way
| easier. If you already have a service with a limited
| geographical range its not bad.
| vimda wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Probably the old habit of batch processing.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://museum.lingscars.com/
|
| The company was well known amongst the web development industry,
| as it was often referenced at colleges and universities.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some previous discussion:
|
| 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146
| juniperus wrote:
| 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.
| Ashken wrote:
| Here's the YT video if anyone is interested:
|
| https://youtu.be/z6ep308goxQ?si=uQNHIxnRpufWJjAF
| qoez wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_w wrote:
| >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.
| sheept wrote:
| 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)
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It matches the design of Japanese mainstream shops. Look up
| images for "Japanese drugstore" to see what I mean here.
| pmdr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Speaking of design, I absolutely cannot stand the font used in
| TFA. Especially the lower case f. It's actually painful to look
| at.
| mbo wrote:
| 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")
| theflyestpilot wrote:
| Chinese web design also interesting
| Izkata wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It looks better than the usual solo founder saas that has 2 words
| per screen and infinitely scrolls to be honest.
| jp1016 wrote:
| 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.
| a456463 wrote:
| 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
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