Issue 1 demo cover. Who drew the anime girl?

I have mixed feelings about cover design. April 2010 being our first issue, and we really don’t want BiteSizedJapan.com to be seen as “just another Anime magazine”. After all, that’s not what we’re about. We’re a Japanese Culture magazine, and Japan is far more than Anime, Manga and schoolgirls (no, really!). We will be far broader in our exploration of Japanese culture.

A quick google of “japanese culture” kicks up 100′s of interesting web sites that touch on similar themes to BSJ. While many are packed with interesting information, the majority feel like academic web sites or wikis. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these, but they are hardly inspire or catch the eye. There are obvious exceptions such as the rather excellent www.tokyocube.com or www.pingmag.jp (sadly no longer published). This is the “cool” end of the market, but both of them lack the magazine format that attracts me to working on Bite Sized Japan.

Finding a balance between the “cool” and “academic”, while trying to keep our magazine format*, is challenging. For our premier issue its really important for us to catch the eye of casual surfers, while managing to promote that we’re an information rich publication, rather than just lots of pretty pictures of anime girls and funny things in Japan.

* There is of course one small caveat to all of this: We’re not a printed magazine. Being exclusively online means that pretty welcome pages are a no go: we have to present the guts of our content to our readers (and the lovely GoogleBot) first-hit. Our cover page is unlikely to be the first page a reader will see when they come across our magazine as we’ve actually reversed the order from a traditional print magazine!