What do you want to achieve?
Creating orginal UI designs.
What is the issue?
I always copy designs for practice. (I always make sure to give credit.)
What solutions have you tried so far?
Research on Google
Howdy, from experience I just use art styles I like. I can get inspiration by looking at font web cites. For me I can see a cool and customized font and it sparks an idea on how to do something. If this does not work well just consider your game, like in a fun hangout game you would want bright shiny buttons that invite everyone, in a horror game you want old, creaky and rustic buttons that scare the player and are not very inviting to click.
I first decide on the art concept, style, theme & the color consistency that’s going to fit in that specific genre for the game (pretty much of what you’d expect in art). Once everything has been sketched out, the deciding factors for me would be asking myself,
“Alright, I got this cool concept but where do I position this?”
“Is it clunky or is it reasonable to put this UI element here or there?”
“Should they be categorized into different sections if they’re messy & tedious for players to interact with?”
“Should I export these into separate pieces if I/the programmer want(s) more control on tweening or coding them?”
And possibly lots more questions that are optional to decide about. If it fits the game’s concept, style and etc. it definitely fits. But then another thought arrives if it does occur to you, “It’s decent or good enough, but I don’t think this is even close to being a good design people could do it better and so can I, so what should I do?”.
Explore! Look up for UI design references not saying you should copy them, but research every bits of detail the UI design has to offer & use that detail and at least attempt to come up with a layout and how to incorporate that type of style. Once you’re done with your draft, get feedbacks. They’ll help you throughout your entire career in UI designing.
[Optional] Another thing would be recreating UI designs from Triple AAA games and see if it’s possible with your current experience, and get to know more about its elements and why they blend in so well. Of course, you should be giving credits to the original creator of that UI design.
Always get motivated & set a specific mindset for you to keep on pushing, move forward and seek improvements 'til you think you’ve reached the end but is only the beginning of your journey.
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