There is a dissonance I’ve heard brought up more than once. It goes something like this: Japan is this beautiful place, renowned for cleanliness, simplicity, and sparse, orderly design in physical spaces. But digital design out of Japan is cramped, cluttered, and garish. Why?
Someone, presumably named Sabrina, has published some research into this at sabrinas.space. “3 leading possible causes”:
- Lack of fonts and lack of capitalization to help with visual hierarchies. (Although doesn’t hold up to other areas that use CJK characters).
- Risk-averse culture requires more information-dense design. (Although doesn’t hold up to regional neighbors).
- Smartphone culture evolved differently, continuing a text-heavy web that came about sooner.
It’s nice to see some research rather than just guessing, even if there is still a lot of questions. I’d love to see a tech journalist take this on, as complimentary research. Feels like you could get a hold of some Japanese design teams and just ask them.
Updates:
- The website from above was an artifact of the main event: this video.
- There is a reaction video also worth checking out.
Thoughts?
Email me or comment below.
Also CodePen PRO is quite a deal. 🙏
Design tools and CSS have been engineered in a way that overlooks or excludes Japanese priorities and workflows (e.g., using whitespace as a design element, handling text layout from an alternate point of view, and making the use of critical OpenType features easier). I am still learning what it means to do better. The difficult design situation we face with Japanese text is not intentional. People designing in Japanese, and in other languages, need better defaults and tools.
While Sabrina did not link the video in her post, she did a great visual overview of the content and methodology on Answers in Progress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ
I watched her video a little while ago. It’s interesting, and wonder if there are a group of Japanese web designers that have done a “why western websites are so spread out” research too.
I would also assume the impact of print layout would drive a part of that decision making, as it does with ‘Western” design or any culturally driven direction.
Add to that the general changes in IA and UX for e-commerce best practices that reflect how Japan (and other APAC countries) shop IRL could feed into it.
Stay curious ;-)
https://youtu.be/Opy-SjDU0UY this YouTuber, Cynthia Zhou made a video in response to Answer in Progress’s video where she says it’s due to cultural reasons. It’s a really good watch and she deserves way more subs. East Asians are generally holistic thinkers, which means they can more easily process a lot of information at once because they see the big picture and larger context. Westerners are generally analytic thinkers which means they focus on individual objects and details about that object. For example, an analytic thinker would describe a dining table has having four legs and being made of wood while a holistic thinker would describe it as a place where people sit and eat. All the above examples were from her video.