UI Design

Territory Studio’s UI Design for Guardians of the Galaxy.

In the world of film production and CG effects, there is a separate world of motion designers that craft user interfaces for on screen displays. They are a unique group of individuals that craft high-tech, or LoFi looks for the film industry from scratch. What they uild has to be unique, creative, convincing, and blend with the overall look and feel of the film. In many ways, these teams are creating another character for the actors to interact with. When it’s done right, it can be absolutely mesmerizing. This work is complex, involved, highly detailed, and time consuming to produce.

For Guardians of the Galaxy, Territory Studios produced a multitude of screens for the entire movie. They developed everything from dancing particle systems, to unique type faces that are used in the on-screen displays. Below is a sampling of some of the unique UI systems they created, along with a show reel of the total. The link above takes you to Territories site, where there are a number of still frames that really highlight the quality of the work they did for this movie.

I’m Addicted to “Dots”.

Dots is a nice little gaming app that was developed by New York based, Betaworks One. The game is very simple; try and connect as many same-colored dots as you can using only vertical and horizontal lines in 60 seconds, in 30 moves, or you can play it in endless mode.

Dots interface is extremely clean and simple and has a social media connection allowing you to connect to your friends via Twitter or Facebook to see your friends high scores. Weekly score boards reset every Sunday, giving you a chance to make it to the top of the list and enhance the competition across your network.

Since it’s release Dots has jumped to the number one mobile game in twenty countries, with good reason. The simple clean interface and engaging user experience makes Dots highly addictive.

Razorfish Emerging Experiences – KinectiChord

About a week ago at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Razorfish Emerging Experiences Lab debuted our their latest creation, the KinectiChord. KinectiChord is a multiuser, multisensory experience that blends physical and digital experiences in an unexpected and delightful way.

The device was on display in the Microsoft Advertising Beach Club over the course of the festival and participants were encouraged to interact with the device. The KinectiChord experience allows multiple users to see, hear and feel technology like never before. It’s a really nice blend of art and technology that extends the overall user experience. It’ll be interesting to see where Razorfish takes this in the future.

Labbler, Professional Social Networking for the Music Industry.

A friend of mine sent me a link to “Labbler” this morning raving about the clean easy to use UI design, and I have to admit it looks really nice. The thing is I don’t want to sign up to experience the whole Labbler site, so I’m not really sure how well it works.

According to the designers website, “Labbler is a music business community connecting Artists, Labels, Venues, Booking Agencies, Promoters and Fans. With Labbler you can create multiple pages for one account – e.g. pages of your Artists, Label and Booking agency. You can upload, search and share Artists, Music, Charts, Photos, Events, News and more. And there are many other features about to launch.”

Sounds good to me. If I were involved in the music business I’d sign up. The screen shots below give a pretty solid idea of how it works, and what the feature set is. From the look of the still images, this kind of feels like a mash up between LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Facebook, or what Myspace could have been if they had kept to their original band/music based roots.