Quests UI

I badly want to get into designing user interfaces for games. I think it's the perfect job for me because I get to do a variety of technical and creative work. For some reason that makes no sense to me, people don't want to do UI design in the games world. You get to do illustration, design, animation, and some light coding—while solving the puzzle of how to clearly communicate information to the player. I think it's fun, but I guess it's not for everybody. This would be an overlay menu for a fantasy MMO like World of Warcraft. It was given to me as a test. The company decided not to hire me because I don't have experience with a specific technology they are using, but have been very helpful and gracious by recommending me to their friends and colleagues.

This was the wireframe. The art direction was to be an edgy, mystical, fantasy hardcore MMO style like WOW and League of Legends. I want to talk about the UI decisions I made, but I think it would become a TL;DR situation. If you have any questions, leave me a comment :)

2/20/10

Today I was painting stuff for a project I have to keep under wraps. These are annoying because I like showing what I'm working on, and often what I make under such situations never see the light of day, or they do, but after such a long time that you don't care about them anymore. This one, luckily, should be shown at the end of the month.

In the mean time, I thought I'd share this little texture image I used yesterday to complete the sixwordtales.com illustration. I've been haunting design related sites lately, and I'm finding the cross-pollination fruitful. I read this tutorial on blog.spoongraphics.co.uk, and thought I'd give it a try. I didn't really learn anything new about Photoshop, but I did learn a different way to use it and think about layering and light. Basically the first thing this tutorial calls for is a stock image of smoke, which I cannot afford and probably wouldn't buy anyway; I'm more of a hands on/DIY type of artist, and I like the control it affords me. I have a luxury that a lot of graphic designers don't, which is a wealth of art materials and old paper, and a place to get messy if I need to. Usually GD pros or production artists are at a desk all day and don't have the option of making their own textures, so they rely on stock images.

This is a wet-on-wet ink wash, sprinkled with some salt for the white spots. I actually have a lot of textures I've made over the years for use in digital artwork. Spray-paint, spatters, ink washes, all kinds of papers, wood grains, etc. They're always good to have on-hand.