> This is a beautiful looking site but is decidedly designed for Japanese readers.

Well, yeah, it's a site in Japanese with specifically Japanese subject matter, why is that a problem?

> I will leave cultural commentary aside. While the romanized names are large, they are incredibly awkward to read being rendered vertically with rotation

IMO, vertically-with-rotation is fine, probably even ideal, for reading the romanized text given the rest of the design, which presumably is appropriate for the main target audience.

The only real readability problem I see is that the text color doesn't change for contrast with the background color.

> I would recommend rendering the romanji vertically without rotation

Please don't. Consistently rotated context is easier to read as words than vertical words of horizontal letters.

> or using a Western left-to-right rendering

That's done for the Romanized text where space permits (e.g., for the selected color in the right-side banner.) But unless you are suggesting that the site should be designed first and foremost for Westerners, I don't see any more of that as reasonable.

> IMO, vertically-with-rotation is fine, probably even ideal, for reading the romanized text given the rest of the design, which presumably is appropriate for the main target audience.

I'm soso with the rotated text but the font choice just compounds the readability issue. the lines are so thin that, when rotated, they just become overly antialiased.

That being said, if you look around you'll basically _never_ see characters from horizontal languages on ANY public billboards that are rotated. They're always vertically oriented letters. While it may work for you personally, graphic designers learned a long time ago that this doesn't work for the general populace.

> Well, yeah, it's a site in Japanese with specifically Japanese subject matter, why is that a problem?

people in the English speaking world forget that not everything is optimized for them.

> people in the English speaking world forget that not everything is optimized for them.

people everywhere forget that not only are there people who process things differently than them, but that on the web we have the technology to accommodate most of those needs.

In this case the whole thing could be rotated one way for folks with their browsers set to a language that is traditionally vertical and another way for folks where their browsers are left-to-right languages, and rotated and flipped for folks with right-to-left languages.

You could have just rotate everything 90 degreees and the site would be readable for everyone.

To me it looks like they agree with the MS Zune music player choice of color pallete ... for background.

Don't tell me this is Zune bad.

https://youtu.be/C08WmKiwcSs?t=76

It is a terrible limitation of Latin characters that it's hard to read vertically. However the hard coded as images labels is inexcusable. Zooming in causes the images to look upscaled and terrible.

I think it might actually be more readable (as someone exclusively versed in languages that can be read left-to-right) if the letters were oriented horizontally,

L

I

K

E

S

O

. Otherwise it's a bit difficult to recognize their shapes.

I see Latin characters embedded in vertical CJK text a lot and have encountered both the method the website uses and the one you proposed. In my opinion your method is harder to read because most people read entire clusters of letters at a time, and if the letters were arranged vertically you then have to slowly read it letter by letter instead. In contrast (for me at least) it's very easy to read 90° rotated text by simply tilting my head. I think the 90° rotation method is also the official way of embedding latin text in vertical CJK as well.

I think that’s actually a great point, which I failed to really realize because the words in this case were novel so I was reading them one character at a time, so I actually responded with “how do I make this unfamiliar thing easier for me to read right now”. I would expect being able to recognize rotated Latin script well enough with a bit of practice as well.

Japanese is traditionally written top to bottom, right to left. Vertical typesetting (mainstream in print media but rarely seen on the Web, even though CSS has decent support of TB-RL CJK typesetting now) follows this rule, rotating any words from LR-TB writing systems 90 degrees clockwise.

The idea may seem unconventional at first approach, but this page’s layout—impractical as it is—is like a breath of fresh air to my eyes.

in places with romanized lettering it was long ago determined that this is much more difficult for readers to process. It may be a breath of fresh air for you but for most readers it's difficult to mentally process.

Of course, my appreciation is subjective.

However, I find that the approach described by saagarjha has the objective issue that letters in one word are more difficult to visually connect to each other, and would require a monospace font specially designed for vertical writing.