The Puzzle of Japanese Web Design 242
I'm Not There (1956) writes "Jeffrey Zeldman brings up the interesting issue of the paradox between Japan's strong cultural preference for simplicity in design, contrasted with the complexity of Japanese websites. The post invites you to study several sites, each more crowded than the last. 'It is odd that in Japan, land of world-leading minimalism in the traditional arts and design, Web users and skilled Web design practitioners believe more is more.'"
Do not RTFA, the summary is TFA (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing to see here, a blurb from a blog, kdawson strikes again
Looks less cluttered translated (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Chrome offered to translate the pages in question.
After translation it looks cleaner. I stopped looking at the characters as a mess of intelligible symbols but instead as words that i understood.
Here's a great example of the effect in reverse.
http://slashdot.jp/ [slashdot.jp]
Simplicity != Simplification (Score:5, Interesting)
A preference for simplicity in design does not imply a preference for a simplification in design.
"One should make things as simple as possible; but not simpler."
--Albert Einstein
Simplicity is highly prized wherever the clutter is superfluous or gimmicky. In 'classical' computer science fields such as language and operating system design, this is given the synonym "elegance".
But that is not the same at all as cutting away useful material simply so that you have less material. Even Ubuntu users were wild once Gnome decided that being able to configure sounds for systems events was something that was unnecessary. This was (contrary opinions notwithstanding) an oversimplification.
Japanese website design works differently to western design for a number of reasons. To begin with, the typical font size is somewhere around (the equivalent of) 16pts due to the requirements of distinguishing many and much more complex characters. Up your zoom level by two factors and see how many non-Japanese websites fail to look cluttered.
Also, decent support for native and interoperable characters (and decent support for fine-grained character placement) has historically been poor for Han/Kana scripts, which need it far more than Latin scripts do. Hence why huge chunks of Japanese websites regularly use images of text rather than text. Part of this is admittedly stylistic, but it is still due to the desire to cram different sizes of font into a "block" shape; this is much more common in Japanese due to the fact that ALL characters inherently take the same space and so they are more commonly written into a "grid" than on a "line", logically speaking.
In short, there are many reasons - some technological, some cultural, some stylistic, some inscrutable - for why things are as they are and will remain so for some time to come. But it's not as simple an issue as you might think at first.
Cities reflect websites (Score:3, Interesting)
Asian websites seem to reflect pictures of downtown areas of major asian cities - Tokyo, Hong Kong, parts of Beijing, Vietnam, etc. Shockingly, their major cities don't look terribly different from western megalopolises like NYC and London. Their colorful ads just happen to have asian character sets, which have a lot more lines and end up looking more busy to the western eye. Have you looked at yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] or amazon.com [amazon.com] lately? I mean, Yahoo has cleaned up their image some, but it's still very cluttered and messy. I can only imagine what Google News.jp [google.co.jp] or .cn looks like, or heaven forbid, the japanese translated version of Wunderground.com [wunderground.com]?? Just add some purple and yellow rounded corner rectangles in the background and it looks like every other stereotypical asian website out there.
Anyways, my point is, websites are driven by advertising. Websites of local languages are going to look similar to the Times Squares and Piccadilly Circuses of the world, in their local languages and alphabets. Certain color combinations might make certain alphabets stand out better. Helveltica (and all the child fonts it's spawned over the years) happens to look really good in Red, White or Blue on a White or dark colored background, which is probably why western advertising all looks the same for the most part. People tend to use more asian color schemes for party invitiations when using Comic Sans, and that font everyone loves to hate, Papyrus, tends to look best Black on white on tan.
a bit unfair (Score:2, Interesting)
Something that I've noticed on various Asian sites over the years is that they seem to be mainly text based, displaying a lot of information right when you go to them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for the Asahi Shimbun [asahi.com] or it's English [asahi.com] page. It's a newspaper, it should have a lot of information displayed right in front. So should the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (linked above). The New York Times has one of the best newspaper websites around, mainly because it uses very few images and displays a lot of information right on it's front page. Other local newspaper [miamiherald.com] websites [nwsource.com] I've visited leave little to be desired. I think if the New York Times website were written in Japanese, one might feel the same way as the blog author.
Re:Ever been to Tokyo? (Score:5, Interesting)
The longer you stay here, the more you ignore it, or your brain makes you ignore it.
When I open those webpages, I just see a normal web page. I am way too used to over cluttered web here, that my brain automatically filters what I need. I probably feel very lost on a simple designed western web page. Like, where is all the content?
Re:Not my experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ever been to Tokyo? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some examples:
And it's not just confined to advertising. Everywhere you go you are subjected to escalators that beep when you approach the end, traffic lights that play Japanese folk music when you cross the street, trains with their own theme songs that play at every stop, garbage trucks with their own theme songs. Japan is a very stimulating place to be.
And I think that as a result, Japanese people have a higher threshold for stimulus than other cultures in less densely populated countries. What I may find loud or tasteless because it overloads my senses, Tokyo residents seem to have no trouble processing. What I find to be tasteful (Facebook, if you can call it tasteful), a Japanese person would find very boring (compared to Mixi, which is MUCH more colorful and packed to the brim with emoticons).
That's nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
compared to the web sites in China. In China, not just web sites, all UI have terrible "busy" problems, everything has to be jammed onto the same page. Have you seen an application with 233 buttons on the UI? Yes, that's all the functionalities of the system, and I personally counted the buttons.
I've been working in Shanghai for 7 years. Initially, I just couldn't understand why customers wants us (the vendors, system integrators, developers etc) to put so many things on the same. It's simply not good to have menu, or navigation. Everything has to be presented on the same display. And every customer wants flying ads, flashing images and icons, animation, sound, popups, etc, etc.
After so many projects, I finally started to understand, although I hate it, and would not use it personally.
And everything turns into a vicious cycle that feeds onto itself. There's simply no way to explain to the customers.
Re:Not my experience (Score:3, Interesting)
A really intelligent shower would remember how you like your showers, and repeat it. Really, why should I spend time to get the temperature and pressure just right, when I always want the same thing. There could bather 1, bather 2, etc., for shared use.
Now, there's an innovation I would expect to see in Japan first.
Re:Ever been to Tokyo? (Score:5, Interesting)
Another explanation - Kanji is much denser than English, but attention thresholds are similar, so they need smaller boxes to deliver bite-sized messages to the readers. Smaller boxes means more boxes, which means more clutter.
A quick search (site:.cn, site:.jp, site:.vn, site.kr, site.kh, site:.th) suggests Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese sites are sparser than sites with Kanji or Hanzi.
Maximal use of space (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not my experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Another thing which bothers me a bit: many taps (not all) are designed so people need to use their hands to turn the knobs. So after they wash their hands, they then contaminate their hands when they turn off the taps.
I'm sure most healthy immune systems can cope with a bit of crap or bacteria, so it mainly bothers me from a poor design perspective - you take the trouble to wash your hands but then you have to dirty them again on the tap knobs or the door handles.
Maybe a number of disease spreading cases are not due to people not washing their hands, but because of bad toilet design.
Re:Ever been to Tokyo? (Score:5, Interesting)
As an English speaker I can get the gist of a story in a French newspaper, and I've never studied French. Must be because of the magical properties of the Roman alphabet (which came from pictures of things too, if you go back to Sumerian and squint real hard).
If Japanese and Chinese can understand their language by the kanji, then what the fuck do the Chinese do when confronted with a complex Japanese word that consists of a Kanji followed by kana that NEGATE the root contained in the kanji? A Japanese sentence meaning "whatever you do don't press the button!" becomes <hand><press><button> when a Chinese reads it.
<i>They are pictures - for example the Kanji for person is a stylised stick figure. </i>
They always pick a few kanji out and say "See! it's pictures! The radicals for 'woman' and 'child' make the character for 'safe'! (which is a laughable stretch anyway). That's cute, but if you ever looked past the first page of your basic kanji book you would realize the situation is more like "you take the radical for 'lemon' and you place it next to the radical for 'burlap' and you get the character for 'carburetor'".
The only people who think kanji form some kind of logical system are people who have never studied Japanese. The Japanese writing system is one of those monolithic, looming monstrosities of inefficiency and folly that make you question how it could ever have evolved, much like certain pieces of Microsoft code. Westerners are forgiven in looking at Japanese writing (and kanji overall) and trying to project some kind of reason why it is, and what it does, and how it must have some kind of superior qualities somewhere, but no, there aren't any.
Japanese is a language with a perfectly phonemic alphabet, something almost no other language can boast of. No linguistic theory can explain why they don't use an existing, nearly perfect syllabary they already have, and everyone already knows. After learning to read 100 or so simple glyphs, Japanese children can immediately write and transcribe any word they know or have heard. Machines can easily translate between speech and text with a 1:1 lookup table. But they don't use this immensely efficient, perfectly phonemic syllabary, for no reason whatsoever except masochism. How a language with so few, simple sounds evolved a writing system that uses thousands of difficult to draw and store characters to encode them, while at the same time already having a simple and efficient syllabary for doing the same thing, is surely one of the great mysteries of linguistics.
Re:Hebrew vs Dutch (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, finally, someone who GETS it.
Traditional Japanese woodcut printing originally came from early Dutch traders in the 16th century, and they style and design, minimalist economy of line gives a nod to some of Albrecht Durer's work; (though their anatomy and proportion always maintained a strong influence from China and other centers of art in the region, from hundreds of years prior).
Japanese design was pilfered in the West, back in the 19th century, and popularized by, well, I guess Wright, mostly, (though really, he was stealing the thunder of the Art Nouveau/Arts and Crafts movement that was heavily influenced by Japanese art) - and SOME of that found it's way BACK into Japanese culture via comic books, which influenced American Film Noir movie visual composition, which found it's way into Japanese cinema, Samurai movies, which influenced ITALIAN "American-Cowboy-Themed" Spaghetti-western movies (upon which our ENTIRE modern American concept of the Cowboy is actually based, as opposed to actual REAL historical cowboys/vaqueros), which, in turn, influenced American comic-book artists like Frank Miller (in the 1980's) whose visual style has influenced an entire generation of filmmakers in the 2000's. . . fuck me sideways, there is NOTHING original in design anymore.
So when you take someone with almost zero formal education or training in art, and expose them to a foreign visual style; even one that's been isolated geographically (yet still has very dynamic connections through print, post, and internet) - they'll look at it like it's from another planet, and it all seems fresh and new.
What blew me away, was; I recently made waffles for a Chinese foreign exchange student. She knew what pizza was. She knew what hamburgers were. She had no fucking clue what to do with a waffle. She wanted to put salt on it. She has current magazines and books that look like 1980's style Japanese animation (color and clothing-style wise). Kind of weird. We were told they hate Mexican food. She LOVES all things Mexican. So, China, hell, even Japan, these are large countries, and they're always changing, and we like to think that these countries were completely isolated islands, because their languages and cultures seem so alien. But actually, a lot of ideas churned.
(My karate instructor is one of those guys who has bought into the theory that the Asian martial arts did not originate in China, that they actually migrated over there from Alexander the Great, hundreds of years before history records their existence in China . . . interesting theory, but I don't see the evidence of connection in the actual techniques or traditions. I guess that's one for the professional Anthropologists).