IXD 304 – Art Direction

Prologue

Week 3, this week’s lecture was all about Art Direction. I had one idea in mind I wanted to try out for this project, the idea came from playing a game I had gotten recently.

Task

Kyle gave us the task of taking the words Apollo Space Program and giving it an art direction. This wouldn’t reflect on our final design if we chose another route, but in my case I think I found a direction I want to go for.

As I know what I am planning to make mine look like, here is the interface I want to mimic. This is one of the interfaces from a game called High Fleet. The aesthetic of High Fleet is like what happens when you mix Cold war era technology and other 1970s, 80s and 90s stuff together. The rustic feel and really crowded look makes it all the more immersive. Back during the time of Apollo, computers where the size of rooms basically. There was no Portable Computer. Everything was bulky, massive and very complicated back then. Now like now with actual portable computers and laptops.

HighFleet op Steam

The main thing that grabbed my attention when playing High Fleet was this UI. Like just look at it, there is so much going on in it. That of course wouldn’t be a good thing, to overwhelm the user but in the case of High Fleet that is exactly the point. I am not looking to overwhelm the user going thru my immersive prototype but I do want to give them the sense of dealing with an old school computer.

Sketching

I wanted to try my best to mimic the UI of High Fleet while also keeping it in line with the actual instruments from the Apollo Command Module. I feel this is a good step in the right direction.

I am going to develop up an digital version based on these sketches.

Digital Art Direction

Since I am going for that old school computer feel, I wanted to find a good font to work well with it, thankfully I found a good one. It also closely matches the one used in High Fleet.

 

 

 

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