This game takes place in a sci-fi world. A rustic landscape with neon lights sparingly placed throughout. I wanted the buttons to reflect the same environment. When these buttons are selected they have a neon glow.
Ultimately the project has probably changed greatly from these original assets, but I still learned a lot while working on it.
Please ignore the silly Lorem Ipsum and Ben Kingsley photo I included for the screenshot.
I was recently obsessed with the role-playing text game A Dark Room. The game itself is comprised almost entirely of UI and text. Part of the game is maintaining a fire as the fire dies the room gets darker as does the game itself. This mechanic inspired me to redesign the UI in the game.
I created semi-transparent buttons that would show the transition of the room getting progressively darker as the fire dies out. It all added up to a beautiful transition.
Not every project I have worked on had been a success. Long ago I worked on an ill-fated social trivia app. It started as the game Newsflash, but eventually evolved into Guess What.
I did the entire update that changed the game to Guess What. In less than a week I designed new scenes and completely changed the color palette of the app and all of its buttons. I also created a new more colorful app icon.
An app I have been working on, Monster Guard was recently released. It was created in collaboration with the American Red Cross and Disney. It helps teach kids about what to do during a natural disaster.
You can learn more about the app here https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monster-guard-prepare-for/id925537299?mt=8
Above is the main menu I designed for the app. I worked with a programmer to create the transitions and audio cues. You can also see a glimpse of the Logo I created for the app.
The goal when creating 2D UI is to make graphics that can be repurposed and resized to fit many different circumstances. When creating a button I want it to be easily adapted, to achieve this I often create buttons with several graphics that I layer over each other. All graphics can be created in white and then programmatically recolored. I tend to work in Unity 3D with the plugin 2D Toolkit in which I can easily layer the button graphics and recolor them to my liking.
This is an example of a recent button I created for a preschool educational app.
Noelle Posadas 