From a purely graphic design standpoint, I felt that the design of some of the buttons stuck out to me, and didn't really unify with the design of the rest of the interface. Particularly the shape of the item icons and the skill icons - which take on a cliche "web 2.0" design style, ie: they have a subtle background colour gradient and a glassy/plastic texture, which makes them look very smooth and bubble shaped.
This didn't sit very well with me, and feels like a fairly lazy design solution to me (generally frowned upon as a common and un-innovative graphic design solution in the industry afaik). I also thought that it also somewhat detracts from the artwork of the items themselves, rather than support and enhance it. I much prefered the grungy, textural icons we saw in DI and DII, as this fitted the bloody, dark, action-packed atmosphere much closer.
I am being a bit picky, but I usually recognise and respect the very high standard of graphic design Blizzard puts out, and thought they might like some feedback from fellow designers. Just something the graphic artists may like to consider.
i really dont have a problem with anything unlike alot of "fans". if you want to play diablo 2, play diablo 2 man.. i think the skill icons look great, they arent grey and they allow color and uniqueness to each skill icon. people wanna complain, complain and complain.. who cares. they won't be changing anything or listening to the public because they know the public people are abunch of assholes(not directly pointing at you.) the game looks great, the game looks GREAT! and it will be great.. i'm not worried at all, i know blizzard is going to do a Fantastic job on this game aswell as their other franchises coming out.
oh and i know this is off-topic a little but i read somewhere about people guessing release dates some saying around this time 09, or somewhere in 2010 but if you want my opinion, blizzard is a larger company, they have a much larger team, and they have a huge amount of resources to get this thing done.. anyone agree with me on this thing coming maybe 1/2 quater of 09?
please take my response lightly alright man. but it was a well structured post.
"The one really great thing that most people wouldn't argue with was the grid-based system allowed for very large icons which made the items feel better. So[COLOR=LemonChiffon] [COLOR=White]one of the things we don't like about the current inventory is the icons are smaller than we'd like them to be, so we're working on sizing up the icons themselves to be very large, much larger than say World of Warcraft[/COLOR] [/COLOR']... We've experimented with other things like having different bag types hold different kinds of items, like big items go into this bag and small items go into this bag, but we haven't really settled on anything like that. What we don't want is the grid-based Tetris sort of system."
Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.
-Hunter S. Thompson
GET A LIFE MAN WHO CARES ABOUT OW THE BUTTONS LOOK... Again another epic fail for the fanboys who seem to just want to demolish D3 and make it D2.5. So sad in my perspective please just stop you have no argument no one cares really.. get a life
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I can understand that a lot of people might find this a miniscule detail to look at, but as a graphic designer who is very much interested in ui design, especially in games - this plays a bigger role to us. Remember thread is addressing graphical components specifically - gameplay itself is looking awesome at this stage.
I voiced my opinion mainly because Blizzard is generally one of the best game developers as far as graphic design goes - and web 2.0 buttons is a design solution that even myself (a design student who hasn't even graduated yet) could probably improve upon - in other words, for an experienced artistic director or graphic designer in the industry imo this is an incredibly poor design solution for a graphic UI for a gothic medievil action RPG.
Does rounded, bubble-shaped buttons really say "dark", "gothic", "medievil", or "action" to you?
Web 2.0 has nothing to do with buttons or graphic design in general.
Anyway, back on topic. There's nothing wrong with the buttons, imo. I know it will take me 5-10 mins to learn, remember and get used to using hot keys. After that I won't probably look at buttons anymore.
Yeah I know what you mean, they do remind me of common web 2.0 designs but I still think they suit the game, or what we have seen of it so far. I don't think they look out of place.
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From a purely graphic design standpoint, I felt that the design of some of the buttons stuck out to me, and didn't really unify with the design of the rest of the interface. Particularly the shape of the item icons and the skill icons - which take on a cliche "web 2.0" design style, ie: they have a subtle background colour gradient and a glassy/plastic texture, which makes them look very smooth and bubble shaped.
This didn't sit very well with me, and feels like a fairly lazy design solution to me (generally frowned upon as a common and un-innovative graphic design solution in the industry afaik). I also thought that it also somewhat detracts from the artwork of the items themselves, rather than support and enhance it. I much prefered the grungy, textural icons we saw in DI and DII, as this fitted the bloody, dark, action-packed atmosphere much closer.
I am being a bit picky, but I usually recognise and respect the very high standard of graphic design Blizzard puts out, and thought they might like some feedback from fellow designers. Just something the graphic artists may like to consider.
Did anyone else have any thoughts on this?
oh and i know this is off-topic a little but i read somewhere about people guessing release dates some saying around this time 09, or somewhere in 2010 but if you want my opinion, blizzard is a larger company, they have a much larger team, and they have a huge amount of resources to get this thing done.. anyone agree with me on this thing coming maybe 1/2 quater of 09?
please take my response lightly alright man. but it was a well structured post.
Besides it may change anyway at this point.
http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/900/900777p2.html
-Hunter S. Thompson
TED . LEAP . Woot . MF
I voiced my opinion mainly because Blizzard is generally one of the best game developers as far as graphic design goes - and web 2.0 buttons is a design solution that even myself (a design student who hasn't even graduated yet) could probably improve upon - in other words, for an experienced artistic director or graphic designer in the industry imo this is an incredibly poor design solution for a graphic UI for a gothic medievil action RPG.
Does rounded, bubble-shaped buttons really say "dark", "gothic", "medievil", or "action" to you?
Web 2.0 has nothing to do with buttons or graphic design in general.
Anyway, back on topic. There's nothing wrong with the buttons, imo. I know it will take me 5-10 mins to learn, remember and get used to using hot keys. After that I won't probably look at buttons anymore.