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Exactly.

The author is conflating two things which don't necessarily have any bearing on each other - equating fickle trends in design to mastery.

Flat icons, low-contrast fonts, parallax scrolls or whatever else are not necessarily an evolution in, much less mastery of web design.

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I'm not quite sure it's quite the same as saying that Western designers have "mastered" the web, but my memories of Japanese websites from ten years ago are remarkably similar to how they look today. It seems more relevant that web design in the East hasn't evolved or changed over that period, when western design has.

Yeah, and current trends aside, surely the current design landscape in the Western world has more in common with traditional Japanese art and architecture, than does Japanese web design as it looks today, just as this article suggests.

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