Japanese Animation and Video Game Website Layouts | Hacker News Reader

Japanese Animation and Video Game Website Layouts

designm.ag

34 pointsjakerocheleau31 comments

It's all games, western games are also much more graphically intensive: http://www.battlefield.com/battlefield3 http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/ http://us.battle.net/wow/en/ http://www.callofduty.com/mw3

Not too sure why this surprises anyone...

Indeed. Comparable sites (video games, video game companies, and TV shows) in English follow very similar design patterns.

That said, there are some major Japanese sites with absolutely mind-boggling design ("Rakuten" springs to mind...)

Interesting samples & discussion on (sometimes "busy" & hectic) Japanese web design: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/07/25/1712256/the-puzzle-o...

This is a really great comparison. I would love to write an article on this someday comparing the Eastern/Asian media websites along with Western/American media.

One key difference about web design in Japan versus the US is that Japanese consumers feel more secure with a lot of text on a page.

Here is a good example of how you need to have different designs based on your target audience:

http://www.chatwork.com/ja/

http://www.chatwork.com/en/

Opened the first one and was like "Wow, TLDR the template."

I wonder how dense the actual verbage is, in the original. For example, I know that localization to German from English can be a real pain; as an example, game developers will find UI elements for menus no longer can contain the long words that their old titles translate into.

For anyone that reads Japanese, is this page actually saying a lot, or is the language just taking that long to encode a word/concept?

It's difficult to compare the two because they describe different aspects of the product. The English page has testimonials, pricing information, and some miscellaneous FAQ; the Japanese page has comparisons with email and Skype (the FAQ and pricing are on separate pages).

The Japanese page describes the product's features a bit more succinctly, as they forego the tabs (Group Chat/Mobile/Files/Tasks) for a flat layout with a single paragraph describing each.

Japanese is generally more compressed than English. For instance, consider "dragon" vs "龍". The exception is when polite/formal language is being used, in which case it can get more lengthy. Instructions and descriptions would generally use more polite language, where navigational elements would be more pithy.

If I was to offer a theory on why the Japanese tolerate more text, I would say it's related to higher "skimability". It's easier to pick out symbols within a block of text and get a general feel for what's there vs. words in western alphabets. If this is the case, we would also expect Chinese websites to be similar, and I think that's the case.

Or, it could just be a design trend. For instance, usage of the color pink is much more prevalent in Japanese design.

Great insight thank you for sharing!

Written Japanese does to be a quite a bit more dense than written English, especially if it's heavy in kanji (Chinese symbols), where a single character represents a word or concept and can be several syllables in length when spoken. It's enough of a factor that, back in the 16 bit era when you only had a few MB of storage space to work with, there were several old JRPGs that either needed to have a lot of dialogue cut out in translation to still fit on the cartridge (e.g., Final Fantasy 6), or that were simply never translated at all because it would have been futile to try (e.g., Final Fantasy 5 and Seiken Densetsu 3, according to legend).

However, this page isn't really the best example of that because nearly half the text is actually English loanwords written in katakana (the Japanese syllabary), which is only slightly more dense per character than English, since each character usually represents a consonant and vowel together. So in this case I'd say the Japanese page carries a little more information, but not drastically so. The copy itself is also quite different, though.

As btn said, the Japanese page is "flatter", there's more information directly on the page, things are stated more explicitly, with fewer abbreviated forms and much less stuff hidden behind tabs or links.

In general, however, I think Japanese tends to be a fair bit more information-dense than English for a given amount of space/characters. It can vary greatly, depending, for instance, how polite you're trying to be, how many foreign words you use, etc, but the ideographic core is very, very, dense compared to English.

[A point driven home by trying to write text messages in Japanese versus English... my experience is that it's much harder to cram in what you want to say into the given limits (~160 bytes) in English, despite Japanese characters using multiple bytes each...]

I've never considered the texting issue with limited characters. It must be the same with tweeting in Japanese vs English characters, too.

The interesting thing about Twitter is that the length limit is artificial (as opposed to text messages where I gather it's more a fundamental limitation of some underlying protocol), and it will allow you 140 characters regardless of how many bytes each character uses. So one can actually pack quite a bit into a tweet using CJK languages.

My observation is that English tweets tend to be a single sentence or at most two, maybe with some tags on the end, but Japanese tweets are often complete paragraphs with 4 or more sentences, sometimes more like little mini-essays—and I hear Chinese tweets can border on the epic...

It may seem like they value a lot of text on page, but in fact, they just value content over presentation a lot more.

There's a good reason for this: A LOT of mobile users in Japan who prefer to interact via text, email and/or short form message board, uploading photos/vids as needed, than through their desktops/laptops (although plenty of those as well). Because it's so mobile heavy, you'll often find a lot of sites, usually personal ones, with barely enough HTML to render a usable page in Shift-JIS and that's good enough for them.

Just to clarify: Japanese consumers feel more secure with more text than they do with less text, or Japanese consumers feel more secure with a lot of text than American consumers?

it's interesting how it's the complete opposite of what japanese design is known for...clean minimalism.

but I find that the marketing in Japan tends to reflect the emotions that are generally repressed in their daily lives. the beer ads for example are colorful and wild with joy...imho.

There's also http://www.dannychoo.com/ aka that Storm Trooper dude...

Its like web design in reverse...

That's a very eloquent way of putting it :)

Do you think these layouts are still used because they're better for the target audience, or because the Japanese are more averse to change?

I am by no means an expert of Japanese culture. But from what I can tell, web designers would rather portray the custom animations and glossy menus that you can only achieve through Flash. That is why so many websites are coded strangely, and most of the game/anime websites are using a Flash intro.

I think it's a little of both TBH. I do notice that Japanese designs like to kind of go their own way.

Maybe the Flash layouts are more "exciting" and so it sells more products? This is a great question. It is understandable that it may be easier to add custom renders & graphics of the characters. I would love to speak with somebody from Japan or someone who understands the culture to gauge their opinion.

I think it's more what they know and the current state of evolution of web design (for that country).

I suspect it's also partially the language used where there's differing information density. http://www.tofugu.com/2012/05/01/why-do-japanese-people-talk...

Take a look at a typical Chinese web site say Alibaba. Contrast www.alibaba.com vs. china.alibaba.com.

Take that article with a huge grain of salt though, because the writer seems almost entirely clueless about the subject (which doesn't stop him from pontificating of course)... and more to the point, the general conclusion seems simply incorrect.

Japanese has a huge amount of variation in information density, depending on politeness, etc. Other languages can vary too, but not to the same degree in my experience.

Informal, colloquial, Japanese can be extremely dense because by default much is left unsaid (whereas in English there are many cases where one states the obvious explicitly -- "I agree" instead of "agree" etc). This is particularly true for written Japanese because of its ideographic content, which is extremely dense, but it's true of spoken Japanese too. Japanese is famous for having many homonyms, and one of the reasons it has so many is that words for many things are short, disambiguated by character in writing, or only by context in speaking.

However when one is being polite ... Japanese polite forms (and there's a big range of them) can be absurdly verbose.

So, which form do you consider when talking about the "information density" of a language? I dunno, but most people don't use highly polite forms in everyday speech, and much speech is pretty informal (among friends, family, etc).... and in Japanese, informal speech is generally very short and blunt, more so than English.

[Japanese can sound pretty "busy" because of the staccato nature of its pronunciation, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's actually more information there...]

One possibility is that Japan is a country with 2.1% of IE6 users (source: http://www.ie6countdown.com/) might be playing some part of this. (Although, my hunch is most of that 2.1% are in an office environment...)

Another thing I noticed in years of dealing with Japanese people (although, I'm from Japan, my time in the US is longer) is they certainly do have some obsession with grids -- to the extent they make graphing paper out of Excel to create a document. (Ugh, I hate these documents!) Many of those websites are table styled as well. (Another pet peeve! Use CSS!)

> they make graphing paper out of Excel to create a document

I hate that shit too! They use Excel for the most pointless reasons. I've gotten all kinds of documents as Excel spreadsheets when a simple word document would have sufficed.

It might be too much of a stretch, but maybe this has something to do with so much time spent in childhood writing on 原稿用紙 making Japanese people prefer "grid-like" organization.

You have a good point of there. Japanese does not have kerning, so it is the grid base to begin with.

This and the fact that pictgraphical might be contributing relative acceptance of more texts.

This is actually funny, as I was constantly making jokes in the past with my peers, where western people write very comprehensive documents with too much information, that Japanese counterpart often won't bother reading.

> where western people write very comprehensive documents with too much information, that Japanese counterpart often won't bother reading.

Yeah, I've run into that problem in the past. I have to make a conscious effort to simplify anything I write (or say) in English in order to ensure that Japanese people understand it. They usually won't tell me if they don't understand something, whereas I'm the opposite when it comes to Japanese, so that I can optimize my language learning.

> They usually won't tell me if they don't understand something

Why do you think that is? Because I was raised to always ask questions and learn what you don't understand. I have never really "studied" with a Japanese friend or colleague so I can't say I've ever had the same experience.

The standard explanation is that fear of loss of face[0] makes the Japanese not want to expose the fact that they don't understand what you're saying (or have written).

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)#Chi... (the Chinese explanation also largely applies to Japan)

Not going to lie...this is so much cooler than the boring pastels and usability-tuned shit we have.

It makes me wish that the frontpage of Amazon or Heroku had more <blink> tags.

EDIT: No, seriously, all the pretty happy colors and little cartoon bros and errything. It just seems so happy. ^_^

Hey that's Japan for ya!

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