Comment by iamnothere
14 hours ago
I prefer the Japanese style. Information dense, yet clean. It reminds me of the web before Apple-style minimalism took over.
To contrast with a superficially similar style, Chinese web stores are also maximalist, but they tend to assault you with popup coupons, confetti effects, and other such things. Japanese style feels very efficient and utilitarian by comparison.
>"It reminds me of the web before Apple-style minimalism took over."
The loss of color and texture is my biggest gripe. So many webpages and user interfaces abandoned the idea of distinguishing components using different colors and just went with making the page as close to bleach white as possible. I suppose an upside of this is that it made dark-mode easier to adopt. That being said, good dark mode support seems relatively recent.
And now all AI slop coded by anyone is that. Tell tale signs: AI likes to make cards, implement SVGs by hand, all cards have a left hihghlight border, off center font spacing, badges and notification icons, etc.
I think you made a good observation about what’s in essence different between the Chinese style and the Japanese style. The popup coupons and confetti effects are all animations. Personally I find these animations highly distracting. Whereas if something is information dense but static, I like it.
(There are also non-store Chinese designs; they are not trying to sell anything so they don’t need coupons and confettis. These are actually enjoyable to use. And they are more information dense than the English equivalent because the Chinese script packs more in a smaller space. This of course makes such designs i18n-hostile.)
They feel like paper catalogues!
Do you actually use Japanese websites on frequently? Because I do live in Japan, and I hate their websites with a passion. Go use any Japanese online shop; the purchase flows are usually absurdly convoluted, and they are so information dense that sometimes you don't know what you are actually going to purchase. It is one of the reasons I rarely use Rakuten anymore...
Yeah, I hate to say it, but using Amazon.co.jp is SO refreshing after using a Japanese website. It's really unbelievable how bad most Japanese e-commerce sites are.
Yes, this was the portal style and I still adore it and use it myself, where I can. As long as the page has a scannable information hierarchy, information dense sites are better when you just want to get stuff done (/look stuff up), which for me is most of the time. I don't care about the fluff and "hero images" and the rest.
> Apple-style minimalism took over.
To be fair, it was Microsoft-style minimalism that Jony Ive brought to Apple, who then popularized it.
It reminds me of the “portal” era of Netscape, Excite and Yahoo. Very information dense. Among others’, Google’s minimalism took over.
There are still a few information dense English language sites out there, but they’re rarer. Honorable mentions:
- https://based.cooking/ (or the more updated fork https://publicdomainrecipes.com/)
- https://ooh.directory/
- https://gwern.net/
- https://www.metafilter.com/
- HN :)
(These are primarily text and lack the occasional color pop of the Japanese style, but I still admire the density and efficiency.)
It would not surprise me that Yahoo Japan was the blueprint for many of these sites. It still is extremely popular as a portal destination.
I felt like part of Google's success was that the simple search bar loaded fast in an era where I often had slow internet. Yahoo's portal page had to much on it to distract or slow me down from doing what I came there to do.
Later on I remember finding out Yahoo had a search.yahoo.com page or something that was also just a search bar but that was harder to type so was still a failure of design.
This was before combined search and address bar.