So I am teaching at a Japanese university, and one of the things I teach is related to (very basic) web design. When we do simple HTML and CSS and drag-and-drop website development, the design choices I see in my students’ work are… questionable. It almost feels like there is no understanding of the fact that there needs to be consistency and a pleasant aesthetic feel to such designs. Think red letters on yellow background with unaligned images and several font types and sizes (without any system or specific functional purpose) on one page. I see the same trend in their written works as well (as in, assignment formatting).
Now, I know Japanese web design is infamous for too much text, putting info into images instead of accessible text (this one still kills me every time), lots of colors and difficult to read fonts, etc. But, I mean, do they really look at those websites and think it’s good design? I swear it doesn’t matter how much I emphasize minimalist and user-friendly aesthetics, I can’t seem to change my students’ perception of style and design by much.
I’d like to hear others’ opinions about this. Are there any other cultural / historical / psychological factors I’m missing here? What’s been your experience?
33 comments
There seems to be a cultural difference here. It’s an issue I had to adjust to with the web designers in my company. From a marketing standpoint, white space is good when your customers are American but if you’re marketing to Japanese customers a busy web page is more effective.
>It almost feels like there is no understanding of the fact that there needs to be consistency and a pleasant aesthetic feel to such designs
Did you make this requirement of yours clear to your students and give them a clear guideline of what is expected? Otherwise they won’t magically produce a consistent design.
>I swear it doesn’t matter how much I emphasize minimalist and user-friendly aesthetics
You might have to try different ways to convey what exactly you expect from them because they aren’t going to just read your mind about what you mean by minimalist or user-friendly.
Lots of factors come into play in the atrocious “web design” here. There’s many articles and videos dissecting some of them, [this](https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/) one is from 10 years ago, but nothing has changed since then.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to bring that discussion to your classroom? See what the students think!
I work in UI/UX for a major Japanese brand. Nobody cares in the slightest about UX. That is just a fact.
We have sites/apps that in my opinion are borderline unusable. There are easy fixes but all I hear when I propose fixing them is that the Japanese like broken things and we would lose market share if we fixed it.
Of course there is NEVER any evidence to back this up where as I can include mountains of example of western companies eating the market share of Japanese companies. This is always hand waved away, always due to something else and never about the usability of apps or design.
My comment got pulled for a youtube link, so Google this:
how culture made japanese internet design weird cynthia zhou
There’s a cultural aspect you’re missing and not understanding.
Web design feels like the one thing that Japan’s design culture has purposefully massacred.
Beauty is everywhere in this country – except online.
Design takes time to train and one needs to be repeatedly exposed to examples of what good is and why it’s good. If there was a Japanese version of the book Refactoring UI it would be great as that book takes a very hands on approach to explaining design for devs and dev minded people.
Advertising is mostly print and TV (space is premium) and software has lagged behind as a prestige profession. The web has grown exponentially on the back of English language content as well so learning opportunities have been limited due to the language barrier as well. Recent frameworks like Vue JS come packaged with Japanese docs making things better but there’s still a fair way to go.
Some recent research examined this from a cultural point of view. It may be worth a read. I just had a chat with a colleague about this today.
Thank you! This bothers me more than it should. I’d go as far as this is one of the worst aspects of japan as a whole. Japanese design drives me crazy, whether its websites, presentations, print outs, interface on my washing machine, advertisements, govertment information or whatever. Its always too much unnecessary information, everywhere, unstructred, in a messed up layout and weird design. This causes alot of things to take ALOT longer time than it should, both in my professional as in my private life.
just one example from today. not really design, but the workings are the same. I was on a chat with helpdesk of my bank, it took them 29 messages and 20 minutes of chatting to get to the conclusion that the answer to my yes/no question, was no…. always you need to browse through a sea of information to get to whats relevant. Thats why I also believe that japan is by far the most unproductive of all 7 countries ive ever lived in. Not only do people need to browse this sea of unuseful information, but someone obviousely also need to create it…
I get the “people are used to more “information density” simply due to the language. But that doesn’t justify awful design choices when it comes to colors, fonts, flashing fonts.
Japanese are generally very good when it comes to styles and design. Not only historically built I would also say the average Japanese is more fashionable than the average American or European for example. So they do care and they do have a sense for it. But for whatever reason they’re not able to transfer that into the digital realm.
Are these graphic design students, or IT students?
Not that it really matters, I suppose.
as a graphic design student in a Japanese university I would say Japanese design is either incredible, aesthetically pleasing and modern or just horrible no in-between
> a pleasant aesthetic feel to such designs.
This isn’t just web design. Have a look at some of the shit glamping sites here compared to abroad.
Or those small cabins, tiny house type thing. Outside Japan these are stylish, cute hobbit house type affairs.
Here they are actual mobile prisoner detention units.
No. I don’t want to spend a few nights at a reenactment of Stalag 13.
It’s is always function over form so you end up with a cheap looking utilitarian “design”. In quotes as most of this shit is built. Not actually designed.
I have no idea why. But they’ve kept customer expectations so comically low they are not incentivized to address this. People can’t afford time and money to travel abroad can they..
As someone who is apparently not japanese or did not grow up here, what you see as “consistent” or “pleasant” might be different from what your students see. It seems like you are bent on teaching western style web design to students who grew up around Japanese web design. Which is fine, but did you explain that in your classes? Did you properly explain what you mean by “consistency” or “pleasant aesthetics”? Did you give them references for the style of web design you expect them to work with?
In my experience the kind of people who say “this is just what Japanese people like” are the same people who said Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix etc. would never take off in Japan. They are more than likely unwilling/unable to make major changes and this is a very convenient excuse often given.
I am 3D artist with some web design past.
My opinion: japanese suck at web design. They suck at 3D even more, but that’s not the topic.
At the same time japanese are awesome at designing paper-based products. Pretty much everything I have seen at a japanese bookstore were awesomely designed with good typography work and no red letters on yellow. I think the skills and the mindset you need to make a good book are pretty much similar to those you need to be a good web-designer.
I suppose that the problem is that talented designers there sticks to a bunch of universities and professions which are traditionally popular as a choice among talented people. Others are full of people who’d better think of eating something tasty than about design.
Also they don’t speak English. Me too, but I can read and write at least. Believe me, the world is so small when you aren’t good at english at least enough to ask google something.
I think it all comes down to the difference between English and Kanji. One you need to spell out to understand the meaning the other you need to know the shape to know the meaning. So white space is more inherently important in a language system where seeing every alphabet is needed over a language system where you just have to know the shape and human mind is very good at picking up shapes (for example when you saw a well endowed lady on the street, it took no time for your brain to register it and you instinctively get attracted to it) (for example you know a smartphone is an iPhone you just don’t know if it’s iPhone 12 or Se until you look at the label)
I think it depends. I do web design & print design, and I’ve worked with various Japanese artists and designers depending on what the client wants. There are some people with very cool, very modern design aesthetics and when the client chooses that designer to go with, the website looks great – tbh even better than many western websites I’ve seen where they look too “corporate” in my opinion. Many sites manage to keep a softer, more approachable feeling while also looking beautiful. On the other hand, I’ve worked with clients who insist on adding unnecessary text, unnecessary images. I have to insist that for SEO reasons, they shouldn’t have text in an image and instead should write it out, etc. But anyway, I think when you look at western non-designers making websites through for ex Geocities, etc, you saw the same kind of design aesthetic to be honest. So it’s not so much a Japanese people thing as an amateur thing, imo. Japan just seems to let more non-designers design things.
There was a [study](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167212455828) done around 10 years ago on how Japanese culture has a preference for more information, which reflects in their products like webpages. Also, [another study](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022022114537704) found that Japanese elementary school children have a tendency to put more information in things like artwork.
There actually are some cultural factors or maybe a cultural fixation on nature as it can be tamed aesthetic involved in Japanese web design.
The initial ideas came from concepts of Japanese box gardens – gardens contained to basically one square. Planters have to determine the amount of trees and shrubs and how they change colors seasonally as well as their placement considering rise and fall of the sun and how much light they need. Then where to place smaller flowering or fruit-bearing items, where they still get enough sun, but not too much. Also considering the change by season of these plants. And then placing low plants like mosses, grasses. Are they as a path? A path through where? Does it inhibit the main flower or fruit?
So while Westerners tend to think of a website as unlimited space, put stuff minimally or on various pages, early JP designers (and many still) look at each page as almost it’s own separate box-garden and they have to place various text or images, in various colors or fonts, as a garden design.
I feel it’s worth noting that this sort of thing happens for sites owned by the same company too – compare the English and Japanese language versions of, say, Rakuten – so it probably is culture.
I run into this same problem with teaching presentation when it comes to slides. holy shit does it get bad.
I’m not a web (or any other kind of) designer, but I see corollaries to this quite often in my work as a translator. Even my coworkers with a decent grasp of English tend to make documents with inconsistent fonts, leave half of the punctuation full-width, and things like that.
I feel as though there’s hypersensitivity to some aspects that are seen as arbitrary to an English speaker (ALWAYS CAPITALIZING every letter in a proper noun if it’s capitalized that way somewhere else, always using the same terminology to express the same idea to the point of, to a Westerner’s ear, redundancy), and things like font sizes and types and width consistency just don’t set off any alarms.
I think what you’re asking is why people feel okay with misalignment, lack of consistency, and poor legibility. The people commenting that it’s the Japanese aesthetic probably have something of a point, since I think it’s rooted partially in what people see and emphasize, and those sensibilities don’t appear in a vacuum. But a preference for information density doesn’t automatically make people use inconsistent fonts, sometimes in the same sentence in a formal word document. I have to confess I don’t fully understand it myself.
Some really good Japanese sites in https://choooodoii.com for example. I personally think many people know what good design is but I think maybe there’s a separation between business and art, just like there’s a separation between rikei and bunkei, etc.
It depends on the design firm you work for. A company that produces simple and minimalistic websites is a design office of a major company. They often graduate from art universities.
However, it is difficult for those who study at general short-term schools to enter a major design office. They enter an office that produces websites like Rakuten Ichiba, which is often seen in Japan.
I am a designer. In my opinion, design is not art. It is commercial design. Their customers are Japanese, not Westerners.So I think it is meaningless to teach Japanese what Westerners think is great design. If you work in the West, it might be good.A truly great teacher would research designs that would be popular with the Japanese and teach them to their students.
I do a fair amount of product marketing collateral, which is different, but I understand where you are coming from. I have to make compromises, tbh. Have also designed a website for a side business.
There are two ways to look at this –
1-Japanese web design is crap. We much teach a better way.
2-Japanese web design is a product of what is in demand in Japan but we can influence that.
I think you could frame your job as teaching an alternative method; sort of a “what is popular around the world” or something framed that way. One of the things you could do, is work with your students on how to incorporate global best practices into a Japanese design. A sort of “localization” if you will.
Similar to this – Starbucks is probably 80% the same as it is in America. But that 20% difference is incredibly important to making them popular in Japan. If you can teach kids how to integrate some of your practices it might make a huge difference.
I find it really ironic that Japan has been hailed for hospitality. Hospitality, in some sense, can be thought as a form of user experience, and Japanese culture is well-known in this regard. Yet, this does not translate into digital experience. Why…
Japanese companies are obsessed with having those buttons that jump you back to the top of the page. Always makes me laugh when I see one. They really do love the laziest and worst-looking designs.
My impression is that many Japanese follow the bento-box design philosophy: cram as many different elements into the smallest space as possible.
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insert made in Japan or some crazy arbitrary ranking scale
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Forget even why you are looking at the one singular page which you have been scrolling down on for 5 minutes and still haven’t reached the bottom…sometimes the top part has been duplicated in the lower part….
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scream!!
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Found the purchase button…Can’t remember for what though
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unsubscribe to mail magazine.
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Absolutely fantastic design. I don’t see any problems at all.
Japanese web design is if everyone decided to design webpages based around what the inside of a ドン・キホーテ looks like.
“Ok designer team gather around. Your assignment is to make your web page look somewhat worse than the Yahoo HP from 1996. Gambare!!”
I’d like to think that the reason for such crap designs is the lack of computers in school. Imagine if you had go through school without doing a single ppt or any kind of graphic design. My gf had to do a presentation at her school and everyone was amazed how pretty her PPT was designed.
All Japanese think Japanese design is fine…until they see better design. Before the iPhone the most popular phones where domestic dogs running bloated and customized android or worse. Then the iPhone became the most popular phone in record time despite having fewer “must have” features and apps. Lessons learned by Japanese corporations: zero.