Style combination · Contrasts

Cyworld Minihompy × Japanese Dense Web Design

Both pack framed panels onto one screen, but the Japanese portal informs strangers while the minihompy decorates one person's page for friends.

From the research on Cyworld Minihompy & Minimi (Korean Mini-Homepage Culture)

Mix them and make something Cyworld Minihompy Japanese Dense Web Design

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Cyworld Minihompy, their arrangement from Japanese Dense Web Design, the finish from Cyworld Minihompy. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Cyworld Minihompy & Minimi (Korean Mini-Homepage Culture) Japanese Dense Web Design

Type from Cyworld Minihompy: Ornamented display
Eclectic mixing
Colour from Japanese Dense Web Design: Full polychrome
Flat fields
Form from Cyworld Minihompy: Stylised figuration
Rectilinear
Composition from Japanese Dense Web Design: Column grid
Framed panels
Surface from Cyworld Minihompy: Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Cyworld Minihompy

Fiesta

Black Han Sans, standing in for Gulim (굴림), the default Korean Windows system face of Korean web pages

Text · Japanese Dense Web Design

The information-packed look of Japan's big portals, shops, airlines and ministries: three or more narrow columns of boxed modules, crowded with small Japanese text, blue links, tiny thumbnails, dated news lists and rotating ad banners, in bright colours on a white page. Grown from the link directories of the late-1990s portals, often tied to the text-heavy phone web of i-mode, and kept by Yahoo! JAPAN, Rakuten and Kakaku.com into the 2020s, it puts completeness before calm and builds hierarchy with colour and boxes instead of type size.

Zen Kaku Gothic New; Japanese Dense Web Design used MS PGothic (ＭＳＰゴシック), distributed with Windows from Windows 95, the Windows fallback in the font stacks of mhlw.go.jp, kakaku.com and Rakuten Travel and Meiryo (C&G Inc., Eiichi Kōno and Takeharu Suzuki, with Latin letters by Matthew Carter after Verdana), the default Japanese system font from Windows Vista, first in kakaku.com's stack

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Japanese Dense Web Design, with a counter-accent from Cyworld Minihompy. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Cyworld Minihompy & Minimi (Korean Mini-Homepage Culture) Japanese Dense Web Design

#ffffff ground · 36%
#333333 ink · 14%
#0650cb accent · 18%
#f58220 accent · 14%
#bf0000 accent · 10%
#a9cfe8 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ffffff;
  --ink: #333333;
  --accent-1: #0650cb;
  --accent-2: #f58220;
  --accent-3: #bf0000;
  --accent-4: #a9cfe8;
  --font-display: "Black Han Sans", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Zen Kaku Gothic New", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Cyworld Minihompy & Minimi (Korean Mini-Homepage Culture): Cyworld, minihompy and minimi are trade names of a company that has relaunched the service: draw new avatars, rooms and frames rather than copying Cyworld's own items, logo or interface art. Real minihompys hold private people's selfies, diaries and comments; do not reproduce or scrape them as examples. The palette is an evocation of the pastel skins and light frames, not a sourced record of Cyworld's interface colours; the orange is unsourced.

Japanese Dense Web Design: Treat this as one Japanese web convention among several, not as a national essence or simply as bad design: commentators argue the density serves readers who want complete information before deciding (McGowan, 2018; Fujitsu Benelux, 2025), and many Japanese brands (MUJI, UNIQLO, POLA) choose minimal sites. Similar density appears on Korean portals such as Naver, which Fujitsu Benelux sets beside Yahoo! JAPAN, and Cruz found other regions that write in CJK characters close to Japan, so do not present it as uniquely Japanese. Dense pages still need accessibility work: offer a text-size control and a pause button for rotating banners, as mhlw.go.jp does, and give headlines lettered as images real text or alt text.

The two styles

2001–2015 · East Asia Cyworld Minihompy & Minimi (Korean Mini-Homepage Culture) The personal mini-homepage of Korea's Cyworld: one fixed, framed template that every user decorated item by item with a paid currency of acorns (dotori). A title bar; a left column with profile photo, mood line and friend list; in the centre the miniroom, a small isometric room of bought pixel furniture where a small pixel-style avatar (the minimi) lives; a right-hand menu of tabs; and a visitor counter. Selfies, diary entries, guestbook notes and wistful captions made it, in Korean press words, the nation's collective diary and photo album.

A densely packed Japanese travel website-style poster features Mount Fuji framed by cherry blossoms, surrounded by colorful booking panels, trip prices, hotel photographs, food, sightseeing destinations, and discount coupons. Blue, red, green, and yellow headers organize three columns of Japanese text and travel icons.

1999–present · East Asia Japanese Dense Web Design The information-packed look of Japan's big portals, shops, airlines and ministries: three or more narrow columns of boxed modules, crowded with small Japanese text, blue links, tiny thumbnails, dated news lists and rotating ad banners, in bright colours on a white page. Grown from the link directories of the late-1990s portals, often tied to the text-heavy phone web of i-mode, and kept by Yahoo! JAPAN, Rakuten and Kakaku.com into the 2020s, it puts completeness before calm and builds hierarchy with colour and boxes instead of type size.

More combinations

With Cyworld Minihompy

With Japanese Dense Web Design

Every style combination