Pack the Bento
April 21, 2024
The bento box has been around Japanese families for centuries, serving as a convenient way of packing a well-balanced meal into a small box.
Packed Information
The essence of the Japanese bento box can be carried over to web design. Like a balanced meal packed in a small box, a website can present balanced and digestible information at a glance. Dividing information into well-organized grids on the web mirrors the division of food into small boxes in a bento.
This design has proven to be valuable in our fast-paced modern world, where people have very short attention spans. According to scientific research, humans on average can focus on 7 items at once. Bento boxes provides different focal points, allowing our eyes to shift between segments of information, rather than being overwhelmed by a single, large chunk of text.
How to Pack a Bento
Similar to packing a bento for our lunch, packing a bento for the web follows some basic principles:
- Visual hierarchy: prioritize content by size and placement - similar to how a real bento prioritize the proportions of carbs and protein. This helps guide the viewer's eye to the most important elements first.
- Consistency: maintain visual consistency across all sections, just as how a real bento appeals to the senses with its aesthetic harmony.
- Responsiveness: Adapt the web layout to various screen sizes to ensure usability across different devices.
Make Your Own Bento
While the bento box is easily digestible for our brain, is it good to just be satisfied with all those pre-packaged information from the web?
In contrast to the immediate satisfaction of pre-packaged bento content, engaging with more extensive content - such as long articles or books - challenges our minds to create our own structures. This mental exercise helps us to create our "personal bento" - our personal understanding of structures and relationships of the content.
It is true that un-packaged information may not be as easily consumable as those compact bento boxes. However, in our daily lives, we always consume information in an un-packaged way. The conversations that we have, the events that we experience, are un-packaged and organic. We are living in organic contexts. Developing the ability to synthesize and extract information from these contexts is crucial. Only by doing so can we develop our own critical thinking and our own perspective of the world, instead of passively accepting pre-packaged ideas from others.
Make your own bento, don't just accept other's.