User Interface Design

maonlyart

Maybe this is the wrong part of the forum, maybe this is the wrong website all together.

I want to know how to be a user interface designer.

I have a degree in illustration, and completed a post grad course in Game Art.

Family issues have kept me out of the 3D gaming creation loop for 3 years.

I've been doing some inventory in life and what I keep coming back to is User Interface Design.

I'm looking into self learning ActionScript with the old version of Adobe Flash that I have.


What else is there? Any specific schools that offer User Interface Design courses? Do I find a mentor? Walk around with a portfolio of icons and buttons and hope someone is interested? I don't have any Interface Design pieces in my current portfolio because learning the programming language is my current barrier.

If you are a User Interface Designer, please tell me how you became one.

I assume my background in Illustration combines with a scripting language of some kind. Looking at modding interfaces for some of the games I play, I've learned that there is texture map and a game code with coordinates to that texture map. Changing the images in a texture map (and staying within the coordinates) seems like a good way to practice the design aspect but how does that kind of thing translate into a CAREER as a User Interface Designer?

To be clear, I'm not talking about User Experience Design, although I realize it is almost the same thing.

My portfolio:
http://www.maonlyart.com

Ashaman73

I'm not certain that there's something like a dedicated career as UI designer in game development. UI in games depends heavily on the game design and is more or less part of it. An artist will most likely only tweak and finish the visual conecpt of a UI design, but first comes function and useability defined by the game design (and input devices).

The UI design differs greatly between games. Eg take a look at games like dead space which integrate the UI completely in the game world, whereas games like WoW have an extra UI layer directly on-top of the game. Or many console titles which have an UI design based on the input-controller useablitlty or mobile games which needs to consider the touch screen.

marks

What? No.

Dedicated UI artists/designers are like gold dust - they are super rare and there seems to always be job openings for UI artists.

RN

I appreciate interface design.
I especially like to come by the Skins Factory website from time to time, for inspiration.

The Skins Factory

There are some UI artists around the web too.

GetMyUI

There's also a lot of interface design applied to audio software. I take it audio engineers like fancy interfaces:

iZotope Ozone

Regarding art software, with Photoshop and Illustrator you can do any interface graphics you want. If you can't afford these or you don't want to use pirated versions, you can use the GIMP and Inkscape.
Some of the graphics are rendered in real time by the applications, like those graph curves in Ozone, because the user can manipulate the curves.

I'm a hobbyist, but if I were you I would put my studies with scripting on hold and focus all of my efforts on creating polished art.

- Learn about the different elements of software UI:
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/widgets-and-layouts.html#the-widget-classes

- Think of UI themes (a business application, a mobile app, a fantasy game etc.) and create the complete set of interface graphics for each theme, with buttons, checkboxes, sliders, spinners, text-fields etc.

- Build a reference library. Collect images of interfaces from games and applications that you find intriguing so that you can use them later for inspiration and analysis.

joebount

oh snap, I thought it was a thread that talked about xNormal

throttlekitty

You can also give yourself design challenges that don't need to be functional as practice. Take some screenshots of a game you like without the UI, and design a new one without worrying about what's actually possible.

maonlyart

Thanks all for your replies!

Kryzon! Thanks for all that info. I understand what you mean, instead of focusing how clicking on the button makes the action... just make good looking buttons first.

Since this post I've learned about the existence of Scaleform, has to do with 3DS Max; and Kismet, which is Unreal.

I guess Polycount is less about the "2D" aspects of the game and more about the innards like environments and characters... things with a poly count orz

Thanks anyway, it was good to get a feel of things. I'll lurk around here until I get back into modelling mode.

Shrike

You can definitely get a job as interface designer in games, but its kinda like leveldesign, everyone wants something else, making things a bit complicated

I do a lot of UI work myself, and it seems that its generally not as appreciated among the gamers and in general you will see a lot more in the web or movie fields, there are rarely any websites or resources for game related UI it seems. But nice UI can heavily upgrade a game, many games are mainly consisting of UI as well.
From what i have seen are there 3-4 kinds of UI professions

The UI Artist, which is kinda like an traditional artist doing UI graphics, usually not doing anything programmy or a lot design related i found, but its probably not as common (graphic design, typography, colors, layouting, composition, visual communication - are very important)

The UI Designer which is doing the actual design, very often involving coding (and here it gets tricky, as every engine requires different stuff, scaleform, blueprints, ngui, [insert programming language] making it hard to be prepared for everything if youre not a real programmer i guess. Then sometimes the designer is doing the art part as well or is expected to know everything I guess, the art, the design and user experience, sometimes only the implemention itself and UX people do the design and the art, or only the UX and an artist does the 2d stuff

The UX designer is focussed on the usability part and everything, and you do wireframes, flow charts and mock ups, checking data and optimizing afterwards, many people take that very data driven, but personally i think you have to know as designer what is intuitive and what isnt and test around, no need for weeks of testing, either you know how usability works or you dont.

Then you have those movie guys doing mostly sick looking but often unauthentic sci-fi stuff with a lot of motion graphics and feedback but no usability needed for imaginary software in movies, (PS, after effects, cinema 4d and programming mainly)

Sometimes you also have a game designer + UX + general or UI artist combo

Ideally you have to know about everything, UX is super important and you need to be able to make things work somehow. You can make good looking UI without being a super artist that can draw character portraits and romantic borders with lion heads and such if you use simple, clean design and put that artist time into UX, typography and programming. Layouting, composition and colors are very important of course. Its really hard to tell, as every job opening requires a certain mix of these things, but true UI artist should be not too hard to find but dont take my word on it from my limited impressions, just have a look at current UI job requirements

Maybe im not too good at it, but I find UI to be very difficult and challenging, or maybe im just never satisfied. Sometimes i search for hours for a fitting font and be prepared to do a lot of iterations

here is some stuff from me, unity with NGUI here (probably now obsolete because unity 4.6 ui tools) its a very simple UI, but took a lot of time and iteration getting to that, and animated background with shaders and stuff, post effects were done too, and took so many hours finding a color sheme that fit, its far more work than it looks like, as you can not simply follow a reference and replicate that



For games its not the same as for web or software, so dont take their resources too literally. You also have to care about controller shemes and input and even some game design things,
excuse my strange writing, its too late already here

Edit: https://www.linkedin.com/job/ui-artist-jobs/