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Design for bilingual web site : Waseda University Web design
Waseda Universuty Web design
OAS(Organization for Asian Studies) is an International Institute at Waseda University in Japan. Some web sites offer a limited number of supplementary multi-lingual pages, whereas the OAS website required a full internationalization and translation of the entire website into English and Japanese.
Sentence structure and length tend to vary from language to language. We compared the English and Japanese sentence structure and individual characteristics before proposing a design solution. It was our goal to maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the site, regardless of which language the site was being viewed in.
waseda site image
period
February – March 2007
period
Flash 8(ActionScript2.0)
Illustrator CS2
Photoshop CS2
Dreamweaver 8
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Bi-lingual Navigation system
Global Navigation system
Japanese navigation labels are a fairly consistent length, roughly four characters long, whereas in English the length varied greatly. In order to accommodate for these differences in the interface, I designed a different global navigation structure for the English and Japanese versions.
For the Japanese version, I used consistently sized square buttons that are very popular with Japanese web sites. For the English version, I created buttons that were flexible and could account for the different lengths of navigation labels.
Easy to update content for multi-version site
multi-version site In order to make it easier to update both versions of the site,
I designed a consistent layout. Adding a new image to one site automatically updates the other, saving the client time.
I designed flexible spaces for the interface to allow the expansion or contraction based on the display of the chosen language.
Classify information by clearly icon
clearly icons
OAS puts on three different types of events per year. Differentiating the event types from one another has been challenging for their website audience in the past. My goal was to illustrate a visual distinction between the three events, offering a quick intuitive differentiation that didn’t require lengthy explanation.
I created a series of icons that represented each event type and displayed them prominently on the left column of the website. After launching this iconography, there was a noticeable increase in event attendance.