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What's the deal with Japanese web design?

Monday, August 9, 2010, 1:44 AM
Thoughts by John (Article #271)

One of the odd occasional conversation to be had in the web design community is the great question of why does Japanese web design still seem to be stuck in the mid-1990s. Why does every Japanese website like the 90s version of Yahoo ran sideways into paint truck?

A lot of the misconception about Japanese web design begin with gross and off-target generalizations about Japanese art. One is the tendency to view Japanese art as aesthetically simple and pleasing. That is to say, we tend to conflate Japanese art with minimalism.

Japanese art is not minimalist. Especially not in the sense the art world means about 1950s and 1960s New York art scene minimalism. It's not influenced by minimalism, even though it did exert an influence on minimalism.

The minimalism perceived in Japanese art is more of a traditional Zen Buddhist aesthete. And in fact, this is a case where art clearly arises from a long tradition of religious and philosophical encroachment. In that regard, Japanese Zen art is more akin to Islamic medieval art than to American minimalism. As-is, Japanese art is older, more traditional, and more about aesthetic simplicity than true minimalism.

It should also be offered up that Japanese art was never entirely about Zen simplicity. Western observer heavily over-weighted Japanese watercolors (which are really simplistic naturalism or outright romanticism) and Zen calligraphy. A lot of Japanese art is downright ornate. Of course, western observers view ornate art through the lens of baroque architecture, so they sort of miss that Japanese art is ornate. This happens because asking a westerner to think of Japanese art as noisy requires them to step away from 130-decibel nightmare that is a lot of western art tradition.

Modernism and western web design

But, another factor also plays. Japanese art and design did not evolve parallel to Euro-American design in the 20th Century. Particularly, as pertains to web design, Japaense art and design never went through minimalism and modernism because those trends were stunted in Japan by the run-up to the Second World War.

In the western countries, the unquestioned artistic struggle was between modernism and all comers. Particularly, modernism had to fight off minimalism and postmodernism.

In western design circles, minimalism never figured much. And to the extent that it did, it was much more in the Zen calligraphy sense than in the sense of displaying a small, stray, frayed piece of rope (see the Vogel collection at the U.S. National Gallery to really get what the hell I'm talking about). In western design, especially post-war, the big shift was from cluttered, disorganized corporate art that had no real grounding in any artistic movement toward modernism.

The biggest sign post of modernism in western design was the rapid, wildfire emergence of the Helvetica font face in the 1960s. This is particularly important to modern web design because everything in web design in the year 2010 derives from what Helvetica did to the perception of what any effective piece of corporate communication should be and do. Helvetica is a perfectly neutral, functional font that commands normal and negative space equally well. It is firm and it projects confidence.

Present-day web design emerges in the late 1990s, which is when the movement back to modernism hits hard.

In general art, post-modernism reigned hard from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. Even in corporate art, you see a lot of anti-structural or post-structural designs that have the specific intent of usurping modernist design and the perceived capital enterprises these designs symbolize.

But, the grunge era in the early 1990s represented a point at which art caved in just became plain crap. Early web design (think 1994) arose from this mess. And as the internet became widely adopted over the next five years, the clear consensus bubbled up that someone needed to fix this crap.

What you see from 1999 to 2004 is the green sprouts of a 21st Century Modernist art movement. In web design, this is particularly pushed by web standards and CSS. You also see a rapid conversion from the dominance of Times fonts to ans-serif fonts.

Helvetica never quite made it to this side of the mountain. It's now been replaced in popularity in design circles by Verdana. And that's a very valid decision, because Helvetica is a font face that presents a lot of spacing challenges that the average web designer simply cannot be bothered with while trying to make his websites standards compliant.

The aesthetic choice of this age in western design is no question on the side of modernism and the post-Helvetica sans serif fonts.

What about Japan?

Well, the thing with Japanese art and design is that it never went through these periods.

When early modernist architecture was popping up all over Los Angeles in the 1920s and the Bauhaus school was emerging in Germany, the grand debate in Japanese design was between European traditional designs and Japanese traditional designs. The National Diet is a structure built in pure imitation of European capitol buildings. In Japanese architecture, you don't see a real wave of a hardcore American-style modernist structure hit until after 2000.

What this means to web design is that the Japanese never really had those public debates about things like "Is Helvetica evil?" and "Does grunge art do anything besides allow the untalented to hide in plain sight?"

These conversations, which were largely had at US advertising firms and European print houses, strongly shaped what we would now call Web 2.0. In the 1950s, the conversation was "Oh my gawd, makes these cluttered hideous pages go away!" In the 1970s, the conversation was "Anything but Helvetica." By the 1990s the conversation surrounding grunge and postmodernism had degenerated to the point that one can rightly say design, in general was broken.

Web design in the mid-1990s was also thoroughly broken. Or, more accurately, had not yet been assembled. Web design was trying to define itself away from the undefined, busted mess that was the 90s. This was aided because other types of graphic design were similarly broken and in need of repair. In Europe and America, the fix applied was to throw out the broken mess that led from Lou Reed album covers through Geocities and on to MySpace.

The most visible sign of the complete return and recoronation of modernism in the west is Facebook. The emergence of Facebook from 2007 to 2010 was largely an outright rejection, by mass society, of the entire goddamned mess. Facebook was the consequence of western civilization desperately needing to reboot design across the board.

If you ponder it for a second, Facebook vs MySpace was the final battle pitting postmodernism and poststructuralism (MySpace) against modernism and minimalism (Facebook). And at the end of the day, people don't care about personalization half as much as they care about just being able to read and interact with the interface. Facebook won on the long timeline (remember, Facebook was the presumed loser in 2007) because Modernism has an enduring capacity to win all these fights.

So, why not in Japan?

Japanese corporate design is largely stuck about where American corporate design was in the 1950s. Typefaces aren't legible and are prone to being highly variable on a single package. Color choices are gaudy. Clutter is everywhere. Social norms depicted on the packages range from traditional to downright mysogynistic.

You still see a lot more anime style and just plain 50s (US) style garbage in Japanese design than anything else. And like European and American graphic design going into the 1950s, very little of it is rooted in a strong philosophical basis.

If you look at Japanese architecture from the last ten years, modernism is clearly breaking on their shores. Architecture is where modernism really first went mainstream in the U.S. Thirty years later you see it blast its way through all of corporate art.

It's hard to see where that places the arrival of modernism in Japanese corporate art (and thereby, Japanese web design). It's out there. The real question is, how much will the average Japanese corporation look at its packaging and its website and say, "Wow, that's really disorganized and hideous. Let's straighten that up, now."

But, the thing that always seems weird about Japan is its capacity to export more than it imports.

It's easy to look at Japanese architecture and say, "Well, modernism is arriving." The problem is that modernism in Japanese architecture is a natural fit. A lot of modernists borrowed so heavily from traditional Japan that when they looked at early 20th Century Japanese buildings (of the non-pseudo-European variety), they didn't see anything that needed introduced. In fact, they largely saw something to be aspired to.

The consequence of this has been that Japanese design has integrated few of the great debates of western design circles from the 20th Century. And almost none of it has seeped out into Japanese corporate culture. Which means almost none of it has seeped into Japanese web design.

So, where will the cure for Japanese web design come from? If ever?

If Japanese web design ever finds a way to change, it will most likely be native. That is to say, rather than an emergence of modernism and the arrival of a Japanese version of Helvetica, you'll see something emerge out of Zen calligraphy with a bit of influence from European modernist architectural. Since the Japanese have never fought the modernism-grunge battle back and forth and back again, like Americans did from 1950 to 2010, they will need their own point of inception for their own movement. At this time, that just doesn't look like it's on the horizon.

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To Microsoft's credit

Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 12:26 AM
Thoughts by John (Article #266)

I was discussing a problem in Windows with someone online, and the conversation turned to the fact that the type of problem -- though not this particular manifestation -- stretched all the way back to Windows 3.0, the first usable desktop computer with multitasking.

So, for grins I looked on MS's support website for the fix. And sure enough, right there was an EXE waiting to be downloaded for Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 for Workgroups.

Now, I understand that this is no longer an officially supported fix. But, it's still exceedingly hip of MS to have it out there. Especially for an OS that hasn't been since 1995. Last updates were issued in 2003.

Just so the Macophiles don't feel picked, you can find Apple updates on their site going back to to Mac OS 8. Last updates were issued in 1998.

I throw that out there as a weird observation, since I think folks don't take enough time to appreciate what a good job some of these companies do.

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Dear Fedex: enough notices

Thursday, December 31, 2009, 1:15 AM
Thoughts by John (Article #258)

Just a small thought: why does FedEx send a freakin email notice to registered users for every tiny outage they have? I understand the desire of any major company to project that they're on top of things. But, there is a boundary between saying, "Hey, we're here and we know when we screw up" and being overly demonstrative in that effort.

It's obnoxious, FedEx. Quit it.

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No USPS outages this year

Wednesday, December 23, 2009, 12:16 PM
Thoughts by John (Article #255)

I just wanted to give credit where credit is due. Last year, the US Postal service API had serious problems. So far, it's been smooth sailing.

The biggest sales website I run actually ends up with a long season, due to Groundhog Day (I live in Punxsutawney, PA -- whattaya want?!). So, for my part, I don't get to breathe a sigh of relief until about two days after February 2.

On the downside, USPS total mail volume looks to be very down. The postmaster was in the souvenir shop the other day when I went in, and he was giddy just to have someone shipping a pile of packages. Some serious Thunderdome throw down is going to be occurring this next decade among the USPS, UPS and FedEx. Thankfully, DHL and Airborne are already down for the count. Not so sure about losing the USPS.

Anyhoo . . . let's turn that frown upside down. That was way too negative.

Congrats to the USPS techies. You did your job well this year.

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Mine some knowledge from your data with Eureqa

Monday, December 14, 2009, 9:04 PM
Thoughts by John (Article #254)

Eureqa is the type of clever tool that would not have been possible, on a mass scale, a decade ago. Built by the good people at Cornell's Computation Synthesis Laboratory, Eureqa is a functional desktop solution for mining data set to discover equations.

What does that have to do with web design?

Well, if you're in the CSS crowd, nothing. The CSS crowd can stop reading at his point and resuming wasting their time reading articles about CSS on Digg.

If you're in the MySQL crowd, Eureqa can be a serious turn-on. The truth is, we as a society are outputting more data every day than all of humanity did a few decades ago. It's a lot of data, and in many cases, not a lot of answers.

It will be a while before processing power approaches the point where Eureqa can be integrated into a typical web server. It's not an FFMPEG-type game changer just yet.

But, it is a huge first step toward taking some of that data and putting it to use.

The next next big revolution (two nexts, because it's a little ways away) is on demand crunching of data. We're seeing services like Amazon cloud computing bring enterprise-class numbers crunching down to reasonable costs for good projects that demand it. It's not hard to picture in five to ten years a point where we can expect to dump a numbers crunching task worthy of Eureqa into a web server and see results within a few second.

In the near term, I am hoping to take a few of my favorite numbers sets I've always wanted to crunch and build them into a website. Look for more soon.

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Where does the internet end?

Sunday, December 6, 2009, 2:02 AM
Thoughts by John (Article #251)

A simple question often begs a difficult answer. As the internet expands, so too does our idea of the internet. At some point, the internet will become so ubiquitous that the idea itself will cease to exist and just become an abstraction that outlines how we explain what is a background task in our lives.

Some obvious examples exist. For example, an HTPC running Netflix and Hulu. Admittedly, those systems still feel very internetty. But, they're less internetty than how we did the same thing ten years ago: illegal downloading. Also, just removing the word "illegal" from any proposition makes it feel less internetty.

There are less obvious, but still fairly sensible examples. SMS (txting, for the youth and phone crowds) exists at the junction between phone and email. In fact, it can interact seemlessly with both. And it has a slight network feel to it. Especially the super-primitive character limits.

And then there are the examples that make you feel like you live in the future. I've been working on a system for a client that handles retail scan tags. It adds or reduces inventory live in a manner that directly alters the website's stock of items. It's weird to think of a freakin tag as part of the internet. But, considering that it stores state data about a product available on the internet, the simple fact is it is a part of the web.

And as RFID, card swipe and other uniquely identifying systems become more widespread, we as individuals and all of our actions are increasingly part of the internet. With each year, our lives themselves are lived as nodes of an interconnected society. Sure, we can sort of evade being logged. But, short of living in a cabin in the most remote parts of Wyoming, we're being recorded and stored every day in increasingly public ways.

We're approaching the point where the internet doesn't have an actual end. It just is.

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Why I never fell in love with Python

Sunday, November 1, 2009, 11:07 PM
Thoughts by John (Article #248)

There is one immutable rule in the world of programming: if a programming language becomes an unquestioned religion, it probably isn't worth learning.

Think about that for a second. C++ and C have always been highly criticized, despite their status as gatekeepers to the upper echelon of programming. PHP has pretty much swallowed the internet whole, while also allowing some of the most insecure code every written to be spread everywhere. Visual BASIC . . . well, hell . . . anything BASIC has been frowned up since DOS ceased to be the stuff.

Python is supposed to the perfect language.

But, it's not.

First off, Python lacks a core constituency. The core Python user seems to be folks too smart for PHP, too cool for Visual BASIC and way too with it to clunk around with C++.

Think that through. PHP is for web apps -- especially if mixed with MySQL and JavaScript by a reasonably responsible programmer aware of SQL injection. Visual BASIC is for building every quick and dirty app for Windows. And C++ is for building all the stuff that runs, well, everything else -- OSes, compilers, interpreters -- we wouldn't even have PHP and VB if it weren't for C++. And we wouldn't have C++ if it weren't for C.

Python seems to exist in the margins. When you need to access a small portion of scriptable code in an app and you don't want to constantly recompile it. That's cute, but it's not the basis of a language you can really use everywhere.

My main problem with my encounters with Python is that it doesn't work consistently enough with MySQL to be useful. Python is not naturally married to a database like PHP is. And it isn't promiscuous in accessing DBs the way Visual BASIC is. For what I do, that breaks the deal. Python has to go.

Also, Python's community seems oblivious to improving its performance and stability with the most broadly used databases. You can't pimp a language in the year 2009 if it doesn't go all PB&J with at least one major database. LAMP stack is what it is because Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP are inseparable. We'd lost a huge chunk of the internet without anyone of those four.

Python just hasn't found that core constituency. And, frankly, I don't see that ever happening. Python worshippers extol its virtues so much that they don't see its flaws.

Maybe Python is a brilliant language. But, for what?

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SQL injection is complicated?

Monday, August 17, 2009, 10:34 PM
Thoughts by John (Article #245)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8206305.stm

The money quote:

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IE 6 abolition and the perpetual cluelessness of geeks

Wednesday, August 5, 2009, 11:57 AM
Thoughts by John (Article #244)

On the surface, this is a good idea.

But, it also reveals how painfully clueless some geeks are. Scroll down to the little graphic depicting the alternate browsers you can use. The first option is Firefox... Clueless, I tell ya.

Why is it clueless? Because it betrays the goal of abolishing IE 6 in order to engage in the worldwide geek passtime: trashing Internet Explorer while pimping Firefox.

Geeks are sometimes flat-out braindead when it comes to these things. The goal is to abolish IE6. Not, to abolish IE. And yet, it is quite clear that the folks that run IE6nomore.com are not committed to promoting adoption of IE8, but instead are trolling to bash IE in general without regard to version.

It's clueless. Some people like Internet Explorer. Truth be told, if Internet Explorer had been as good with IE8 back in IE6 days, I never would have adopted Firefox. I mostly use Firefox as my primary browser out of entropy. And frankly, if Firefox continues to decline in quality as badly as it did between v 2.0 and v 3.5, Internet Explorer will have me back.

Geeks of the world, get your heads straight. Oppositional behavior is not goal in itself. Nor should it be. The goal should be to have folks running the best browsers so we can all have the best internet possible. Trying to railroad IE6 users into becoming Firefox adopters is dumb. Just let them upgrade to IE8 and skip the bullshit.

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Time to bury Internet Explorer 6

Saturday, July 25, 2009, 11:38 PM
Thoughts by John (Article #243)

With a full 90-95% of all IE users now using Internet Explorer 7 or above, it is time to let folks using IE6 that they are as reviled as the guy who is still running 48-bit encryption in IE 5.5.

OK, IE6 users aren't quite that evil. But, it's a huge burden to the average developer to support IE6, especially in the face of one simple, too cool fact about IE7 and IE8 versus IE6: IE7+ has full support for 24-bit images with transparency.

It doesn't sound like a lot, but one of the things that has long held back truly beautiful web design is that transparency layers were never particularly easy in Internet Explorer. One of the joys of IE7+ is that making transparent, 24-bit PNG layer work is now as easy in IE as it is in Adobe Photoshop.

Firefox has had decent 24-bit PNG transparency support since the beginning of time. IE took a long time to come along to that point, and then took an even longer time to force its users along. The fact that people are still using a web browser built fundamentally for Windows 98 is disturbing. Visually, it shows when you use IE6. It's not as secure, it's not as beautiful and frankly WTF people?!

Now that the percentage of IE6 users is so low, it's time to say good riddance to IE6. IE6 is a symbol of users and corporations all being too willing to accept the status quo. IE6 stagnated for more than half a decade until Mozilla Firefox forced Microsoft to accept it had not won a permanent victory in the browser wars. Frankly, that was a good thing. IE8 is a far, far better browser because of the fight.

At the same time, the stagnation that allowed IE6 to fester for so long -- even amid major security issues -- is unacceptable. It should be a teachable moment in computer history: don't let major platforms stagnate. Ever.

It's time to shove IE6 over the cliff. Sure, some outdated people will complain. So what? We don't accommodate the average weirdo who's still running IE 5.5 on an old Mac Performa, do we?

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