Japan plays host to some very impressive website designers. Their skills in the arts cannot be compared and demonstrate a powerful digital force among Internet readers. Luckily understanding how to read Japanese isn’t required to admire their website graphics and animation effects.
We’ll be looking into a few Japanese website designs which have pushed the limits on conventional development. As a designer it’s a refreshing feeling to work with alternate design concepts and build your own unique ideas off these.
The Rise in Flash
Many of the most popular Japanese websites have been built in Flash, and this is no surprise. Although Flash-based websites do not rank very well in Google (at all) they offer a unique user experience which can’t be found anywhere else.
In fact, Flash offers so much extensible content you may be surprised at just what is possible. Motion backgrounds and animated menu effects are just the tipping point on many Adobe Flash powered websites. Intricate portfolio layouts and detailed characters almost spring to life off the webpage.
One overlooked misconception is the loading speed of each page. Because the entire website is Flash-based it will require a large amount of bandwidth to transfer and download all of the page content. This frequently leads to very long loading/splash pages which are a huge loss for potential user experience.
Although in the end it’s difficult to provide any judgement on the Flash-based approach. There are also many Japanese websites which are built off HTML5/CSS3 so I’m not categorizing all layouts as Flash-based. However with such a wide range of out-of-box thinking Japan has shown us a new outlook on envisioning the modern day website design.
Animation Ignition
It seems the Japanese community is well renowned for their work in the digital animation arts. Ranging from television to video games it seems the artistic works meld into the islands’ society and culture.
In many new-age web designs we are seeing much more illustrated artwork and digital graphics. Icon designers have also integrated an enormous amount of hand-drawn effects into their works. Japanese website designs have become much more branded
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