Japanese Aesthetics: Supplementary Tools and Concepts for the Art of Web Design

Japanese culture has a great connection with the world of aesthetics and a profound and wholehearted appreciation of nature. Nature, and the concept of what nature is, has a complex and deep meaning that has been present throughout the history of Japan, and which we will briefly review over the content of these pages.

As Anne Allison explains in her article review, to understand the perspective by which Japanese culture understands nature, one has to overcome the tendency to conceptualize nature as an entity that humans try to control and master. As Japanese have been taught, nature has a life of its own and one has to live in harmony with it, respect it and understand that both, humans and every element in nature, have a role in this world (Allison).

We will go through a brief introduction to Japanese appreciation of nature and their aesthetics, the power they contain and finally how could these concepts be translated into Web Design. Many of these aesthetic rules and concepts can be applied into the creation of modern art, to understand how this happens we will look into Japanese dry landscape gardens and we will review how different aesthetic rules derived from them can be used in the creation of web sites. To do this we will review the four main principles of Japanese aesthetics: Suggestion, Irregularity, Simplicity and Perishability.