Asian Emoticons

On Wikipedia you can find a list of notable and commonly used emoticons or textual portrayals of a writer’s mood or facial expression in the form of icons. The Eastern emoticons are ‘eye-centered’ (^_^) while Western emoticons are ‘mouth-centered’ :-) Browse emoticons on Wikipedia ...

PingMag Website

Link: Browse «Japan Archive» at PingMag ...

This website shows a friendly screen design and offers a large pool of interesting design-ideas. The site is paused since 2008 and will not be updated since then. Nonetheless it’s worth to browse the archive.

PingMag is an online design magazine based in Tokyo:

Defining the term design as broadly as we can, PingMag writes about ideas and inspiration coming from both world class designers, and from the little store on the corner. We look at everything; product design, packaging, architecture, web design, typography, illustration, photography, fashion, programming, graphics, video, art, toys, traditional crafts, graffiti, set design…. anything, in fact, that we consider inspiring and we think will excite you too.

Menyacocoichi - very inviting

Link: Discover more - website of Menyacocoichi ...

Website with pleasing color-concept, unique layout and delicious food-photography. Very inviting.

Salon de Takarazuka

Link: Website of Salon de Takarazuka ...
This is the very first post in this blog about Japanese web- and print-design. I received the link from a Japanese friend and took it as an impulse to finally begin.
It’s a perfectly made Flash-website (also available in html-version) with some nice mouse-over effects and a really compact interface. We see a colorful screen design, highly contrasted on the dark background, large photo-realistic icons and over all a typical Japanese design.