To be fair, I am kinda fed up as well of this American "Chickenshit Minimalism" ( https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1... ); If you've ever visited a US landing page, it's like it was designed for a five year old. Huge empty blocks of color, sentences consisting of three or four simple words in large type, very few links widely separated from each other, and almost completely static pages with very low information density. Are Americans illiterate or just easily confused? ;)
Joking aside, I'd argue the main reason for the rise of that style of minimalistic website was responsive design. It's much easier to design a website to be responsive if the content is sparsely laid out to begin with. There was a mobile-first trend in web design, and I believe the type of layout you're referring to was the result. Perhaps we'll find better ways of handling responsive design in the future (better in the sense of making sites that are able to better tailor themselves to available resources without a notable increase in code).
No no no... It's just that good web design is simply hard to find. No one is proud of these "asian websites". And it takes a while for updated good design practices to make it across the shore. Here is a decent site:
http://www.jp.playstation.com/psnow/
And for the record, a shitty "asian" one:
My main thing was that asian websites have more image-based content and their sentences and blocks of text look more blocky (due to uniformer characters and lack of spacing). I am not saying this is "shitty" - I am just saying that they have a different culture that makes these website the norm for them.
The rakuten looks quite busy, but at least it looks discoverable. I opened amazon and eBay and frankly they look hard to use since they hide some information.
But yeah the PS one looks more like a western page with a different language.
Also, if your ad blocker is on, you're probably not seeing these pages in their full glory.
JP Yahoo vs US Yahoo is a good contrast also, though the US site does smell of defeat as a portal (JP site is still dominant in Japan).
If you look at landscape design, blank spaces in modern Japanese architecture, minimalist poetry, painting, pottery, film, the websites stand out a lot. There is no "zen" in Japanese websites (again, generally speaking). The "mystic" is how we perceive their work. It exists because it's just hard to quantify art and design. We know something's there though. Famous designers and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright go to Japan and are completely floored. Did many other isolated cultures' aesthetics regularly floor their visitors? People don't get that from Japanese websites... we perceive them differently, without any sense of the "mystic." And that seems odd.
I think it's an interesting question (kind of like "Why is the USA bad at soccer?" which I've heard being discussed a lot before.) but only because of Japan's unquantifiable success in other areas of design.
I've heard the opposite. Think of all the LED and neon lights and the HUGE amount of advertisements in, say, Tokyo. It looks kinda like their websites imo.
For a lot of people, there isn't a good enough answer yet and that is why the question gets asked over and over again.
I think it's because a website isn't a "downtown." It's more like a single building rather than an environment built by thousands of different people. But where is the Toyo Ito of Japanese website designers?
It's true those may be reasons why they look like they do, or part of the reason, but I think it's a question that is interesting. Even if Japanese websites get their "language" from those things, it at least seems like they should get their language from other places also, such as modern architecture or industrial design.
> such as modern architecture or industrial design.
Except for some landmarks, temples and gardens, contemporary architecture in Japan is surprisingly ugly and noisy.
I think most of the big sinners of Japanese webdesign are stores (at least the examples I can think of) and something like Bic Camera is more noisy and flashy in real life than their web presence.
I saw similar differences in video game magazines. I've only had limited exposure to Famitsu, but it seems to favour a collage of smaller images laid out more evenly across the pages compared to something like Edge.
http://www.rpgland.com/content/media/2009/10/rpglanddotcom11...
http://perfectdark.retropixel.net/pdzero/scans/edge_november...
I like both styles, it's just an observation.
Doesn't seem like a "game design sense" anymore than the fact that they have an isolated culture and their games simply resonate within this culture.
We all know the 'asian websites' thing which is spoken about a lot. Their websites look like shit to use, but to them it is simply the better way.
Nothing "mystic" about it, it is simply how they do stuff.
At least this is what I think.