When comes to Web Design blogs, everyone will think of world popular blogs like Smashing Magazine or CSS Tricks. As a person that obsess with Japanese designs, I also go to Web Design blogs that originate from Japan. With my knowledge in Japanese language, I can generally understand the articles and posts from the blog. Actually there are quite a number of blogs and it is quite informative!

Below is the list of the Japanese Web Design/Development blogs below, some of the blogs had featured articles from this blog, really thanks to them. For others, it can be easily found on social bookmark services like Delicious and Hatena Bookmark. Web Design blogs from Japan are quite well written and from here, I can see the different ways of presenting the information compared with the English design blogs. Well enough of words, here is the list, alphabetically sorted.

Continue reading »

There’s a great demand on stock photographs and there are tonnes of stock image websites that you can download the photos for free or by subscription. Using some stock photos might lead you to a cliche designs, but stock photos also can be very useful and assist in producing desired results. Introducing Sozaing, a website that provides quality free stock images that can be used on commercial projects. Brilliant!

At Sozaing, all the photo resources are free, and need no registration to download the photos (thanks). If you found the photos that you would like to download, just click the big download button, circled in as shown in the picture below in this article. Once click, the photos will be downloaded immediately.

Continue reading »

One of Japan biggest attraction is the blooming Japan Pop and Entertainment business, where it has a lot of popular artists, movie works, music releases, gossips and more. As a J-Pop lover, it will be so good if able to keep track and follow the latest news and updates. Well certainly you can read the latest news by newspapers or visiting Japanese News sites. But are there any sites that is in English?

I found a couple of websites that dedicated to bringing the latest news from Japan Entertainment industries to the J-Pop fans! Hurray! All of these sites are very up to date and talks variety of topics like music reviews, drama ratings, happenings and more. Here I present you the J-Pop websites that you can check it out and follow!

Continue reading »

When think of Japan, besides the delicious food and culture, another thing that might comes to mind is the convenient of the public transport especially train system. In capital city of Japan, Tokyo, there are huge amount of train lines that connects to many destinations. One of them is the Tokyo Metro subway. I think if you plan to travel around Tokyo area, the Tokyo Metro will be your best friend.

Well when taking public transports like train, the users have to behave and think of other passengers as well. But there are a lot of situations that might happen too which will lead to unhappy train ride. So to counter such situation, Tokyo Metro created a series of poster to educate the users on what makes a good train passenger.

Continue reading »

When becoming a web designer, sometimes we will need to design newsletter for clients or ourselves to promote and inform customers and subscribers about the latest news and get in touch with them. When designing and coding newsletter, there are quite a few things that we need to take a look to in order to create a perfect and good looking newsletter.

One remarkable characteristics of newsletter design is that it is still only supported by using HTML Tables because many email clients still not as advanced as modern browsers nowadays. Besides, there are also unsupported CSS properties too. Below, I gathered few article links that teach essential tips and tricks when designing newsletter and would like to share with you all.

Continue reading »

As many of you guys already know, Twitter let us to express in less than 140 characters, then connect and meet new friends. And in Japan, Twitter is really a hit and many of the Japanese tweets are “mumbles“. But besides that, despite of limited characters, we can also find some Twitterers that actually educational and teach Japanese!

There are a few of notable Twitter accounts that teaches Japanese via Tweets. This is really recommended for the people who learn Japanese. Links after the jump.

Continue reading »

TokyoGenso is a series of amazing illustrations based on real locations in Tokyo but in ruined condition. It looks like the places has been abandoned for many years and become some sort of a dead city after an apocalyptic event. The artist of this series actually paint the illustration on an actual photo, thus the creation of this highly detailed, surrealistic illustrations.

TokyoGenso provides a very good imagination on how Tokyo will look like when abandoned. Well I think in real life this will not actually happen but it will not stop the illustrator’s imagination. Below are some of his works, and to see more please check out his deviantART gallery, Pixiv gallery (in Japanese and requires log in) or his Ameba blog.

Continue reading »

Japan definitely one destination that everyone loves to visit. Besides sight-seeing and taking memorable pictures, tourists are also getting more creative with the pictures taken by digital cameras or DSLRs and turning them into movie! The moving images normally constructed in two ways: Time-lapse and Stop Motion.

Because of using digital device, we can snap as many photos as we want (if the memory space is no issue). The characteristics of these kind of movies is that the animation is not very smooth, but it is interesting to watch: For stop motion, is to see how the creator stacks the photos, while time-lapse video, is to see the morphing movement. Below are the videos. Please enjoy!

Continue reading »

When talking about pink, we will have certain perception towards this lovely color, for example pink is a feminism color, a general color that represents female, spring season (cherry blossom!), breast cancer awareness etc. I really like pink, because I think women in pink are really cute! And there are quite a number of websites that uses pink too.

Pink has many shades and tints, ranging from shocking pink to cherry blossom pink. Different pink gives different feeling. Some of the websites shown below use pink as overall theme, while others using pink as a contrast color from dark color. Well, below are the 16 great example of websites in pink color!

Continue reading »

When we talk about online font identifying website, the first website that comes to our mind is WhatTheFont by MyFonts. And recently, there is another new font identifying website called What Font is. With both website we can upload a picture or use image URL to identify a font we don’t know. But how accurate they are?

In this article, I would like to compare both WhatTheFont and What Font Is font identification service and to see which one is better and more accurate. To be more precise, I did the test three times and evaluating the usability of the website too.

Continue reading »