[luvcraft]

For being such a "visuals-oriented" country -- birthplace of manga, anime, modern video games, and kaiju movies -- Japan produces some really non-visually-appealing websites. Every single Japanese website I've seen has considerably less (usually none) graphics and visual flare than an equivalent American website. For a case in point, go to any page on Wikipedia, then follow the link on the left to the Japanese version of that page. Dollars to donuts there will be considerably less images on the Japanese page, even for things that ARE Japanese, like Nintendo or Astro Boy. (OK, Ukiyo-e is an exception, but it holds true for the most part otherwise.)

Why is that? Is bandwidth super-expensive in Japan, or do they just really like everything to look like a business textbook in case the boss walks in unexpectedly?

(Waits for Japanophiles to suggest that Japanese people have better imaginations than Americans and thus don't need pictures.)
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[BotageL]

I see great things in this thread's future.
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[psiga]

Something roughly like this insubstantiated claim that I am laying down right here: Computers are about as popular in Japan now as they were in America in '98.
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[luvcraft]

[psiga]

http://web.archive.org/web/19980530120100/www.nintendo.com/home/index.html
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[luvcraft]

[Gironika]

if you care, try to find some "fansites" to whateveritisyouaresearchingfor ... you'll find some weird (and often broken) websites, even better if they were abandoned some years ago ... they look like, ahem, yeah, they look pretty ... aged.
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[Mikey]

[Broco]

ja.wikipedia.org doesn't have images because copyright law is much stricter in Japan. Fair use is a legal concept that exists pretty much only in the United States. Actually, most of the non-English Wikipedias have few images for this reason.

As for Japanese web design in general, I do agree that it is inferior to what we are used to here. It is like 5 years behind the English web in design sensibility (to the extent that the difference can be measured in "years"; of course they diverge and do things that we never did here). That the Japanese don't notice how backwards they are in this respect can give an idea about how rarely they ever visit any English websites.

It is interesting how ghettoized the web is, despite its ostensibly cross-border nature. For example, I hear that in Korea websites commonly use crappy ActiveX plugins, which is very rare here.

[Ebrey]

[Gironika]

otoh, you won't find many jap. flash-lovefest-websites that blink and click and move all over the place.
I often forget that my flash/ad/javascript-blockers do away with most of these nuisances, but whenever I have a new installation running, I encounter this crap way too often.
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[sync-swim]

http://www.pliink.com/mt/marxy/archives/2007/03/the-second-digi.html

Web design hailing from East and Southeast Asia is mostly abysmal across the board. I have a friend studying abroad in Beijing in an internship to learn "business". The supervisor found out he knows how to use Dreamweaver and he's done nothing except make them websites so far.

[haze]

nonsense, what about those websites that are 99% images and the main page is just a fancy border with a tiny 300x300 scrollable frame in the middle and all the links are text in tiny fonts

oh wait i think those aren't actually Japanese, just done by American otaku who all do it because they think it's Japanese.

I kind of admire them not having goddamn flash menus and bloated layouts that only display correctly if you're using the designer's favourite browser. but on the other hand they have a tendency to build up more and more text and text and text on a single gigantic page instead of subdividing, which just cancels out the benefits.

the reason is obvious that all Japanese computer users are nerds who sit in dark rooms and love it when megabytes of scrolling text are projected onto their face so they can go click clack click clack making an ASCII cat cartoon.

[inmatarian]

Stop looking at 2chan.

Flash-based japanese websites are among the most beautiful in the world. Though, I base this mostly on the game publicizing websites that I've seen.
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2993 badness blog email

[extrabastardformula]

How much browsing is done from cell phones? Designing something that looks neat on a cell phone is a different ballgame from designing something that looks neat on my 780p lcd.`

[Gironika]

[Levi]

I think Japanese magazine layouts are shitty too. And their movie trailers...

At some point someone'll have to sit those wacky islanders down and explain to them that vomiting text all over something (in the font equivalent of Snap ITC) is just not cricket.

[v84j3gs2uc7ns4]

[Pat the Great]