Hi Janice! Your art is wonderful, I love how your designs and paintings are creative and unique in your on way, congratulation for the amazing work! I'd like to ask you how you became an UI artist and if you have any suggestions on how to learn it because I really want to study UI and create awesome designs like you do. Thank you very much! :D
Haha thatās a good question. I feel like I kinda justĀ āfellā into UI art. I enjoy doing graphic design and I learned a bit of during my time at art school. My prof was a tough one. We painted letters in gouache and it always had to be perfect. He had some cool lessons on composition which I think was super helpful. Anyways ffwd to internship times:During my internship at Digital Extremes, Warframe was just starting off and they needed someone to help out with ability power icons. So I volunteered because I enjoyed the challenge at the time. Fast forward to getting hired at Digital Extremes I did a few concept tasks and they kept assigning me UI icons because at the time no one was there to help out with the icons except for the concept artists. So I guess being the junior, I got all the UI icon stuff but I didnāt mind ( sometimes I did because I wanted to concentrate on concept stuff but eh :P ) And then I guess thatās where my UI experience really began and I kept doing icons on the side for fun like Destiny related styled icons. I also learned a ton from the UI lead at Digital Extremes (Dorian Stewart) He taught me how to use Illustrator which is VERY important if you want to be a UI artist - everything has to be vectored. If itās not, youāre doing it wrong :P He was super picky when I was vectorizing icons, frustrating at the time, but it really paid off after. You need hawk eyes for that. Every pixel counts when you are doing a UI icon or a menu screen.Ā
Iāve always enjoyed graphic design (all kinds, from package design, advertising, infographics, logos, etc) so it was cool to find out that it could be incorporated into games. To me, icons is like a challenge of taking something complicated to simplifying it to its most simplified form.Ā
When it comes to UX though, Iām horrible lolā¦Iām still learning that. My main forte for a UI artist is doing the art side. Itās good to know UX but usually I think most video game companies will have a UX person (UX is where things are placed in a menu/ its functionality/ flow)Ā
As for wanting to learn UI art, you can always take your favourite game and try to replicate your own set of icons/ menu screens and how you would try and make itĀ ābetterā Ā Like I mentioned before, I love Destinyās look for their UI so I wanted to replicate some badges, banners etc for fun and see what that would be like. Another good game to study UI art is Tomb Raider - they have nice graphic simplified icons. I always look on pinterest for HUD/ UI art inspiration to study from.Ā
https://www.hudsandguis.com/
https://standardsmanual.com/
A good friend gave me this book and I love it. Itās filled with a ton of beautifully designed logos.Ā
Elliot Gray (Bungie)Ā https://dribbble.com/aftercompletion
Ryan Klaverweide:Ā https://www.behance.net/Alrightok
But yeah, I hope that helps :)Ā