Yeah, no, it's a UI blog.
I Don't Love it
Posted 05/28/09 at 4:40 PM by Sovereignty
I remember the EJ UI thread having a pretty okay reputation back in the day; of course the chance of that being reality are slim to none, but I'll romanticize the past as I see fit. Today a largely different trend has emerged, where the best UIs posted are mediocre, and the vast majority are downright terrible.
What's even more obnoxious is that many of these folks think their UI is worth downloading, and once they've duped 50 14-year olds from Sweden into downloading it, they proclaim themselves Gods and continue to proliferate their garbage throughout the internet. Sounds familiar. Proof:
He's not really a perfectionist; it's obvious to even the causal gazer that his action bars aren't centered in their stupid texture. You'll find out bitch.
The Wheel is Fine, Leave it Alone
http://omgphatloots.org/UI/IDLI/Kalazar1.jpg
This is the first lesson any designer should learn: just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. There's no earthly justification for moving all of your shit to the top of the screen. His justification involved clearing out space around his "toon," but that could easily be done by making all of the absurdly large bullshit in the UI an acceptable size.
That doens't mean the cuture equivelant of UI designs shouldn't be pursued; rather, they have to actually be innovated. This is like someone wearing pants on their arms and a shirt on their legs saying "Look at me, I'm unique and innovative." Flipping current practice on its head should not be taken literally.
It's Useless
http://omgphatloots.org/UI/IDLI/Caliste.jpg
The designer of this tragedy had spent a "long time" looking for this obviously boring vector art. There isn't much justification for adding stupid bullshit like this to any user interface; it's clutter and ugly clutter at that. It's not just that this type of superfluous garbage is useless, it's actually counter productive. It's distracting, and unecessarily blocks off a part of what limited viewable space this player already had. There was a worse example of this in the thread, but I hate bullshit whispy smoke flowers so much I chose this instead.
Surprise Ending: It's not a Druid UI =O
This is Pretty Bad
http://omgphatloots.org/UI/IDLI/Gewurion.jpg
This particular UI is not necessarily the ugliest I've ever seen, but it has some pretty terrible choices regardless.
(1) Player and target frames are separated forcing the user to look all over the screen to find information which should be consolodated
(2) Shit is just way to fucking big Why does everyone have the world's widest omen display now-a-days? Can you not adjust the size (I doubt it).
(3) The color scheme is terrible; it looks like the inside of a sad mid 90's trailer home.
(4) Duplicated non-critical information in a way that doesn't promote its use (ex two sets of buffs, one on the player frame and one out in fucking Montana).
(5) A terrible font
(6) Overlapping, reduces usability and aesthetic love.
Ugh
http://omgphatloots.org/UI/IDLI/Gilher.jpg
I hate seeing things like this. It's obvious that about 15 minutes worth of scrolling through interfaces produced this pile of crap. There are like 900 things wrong with this UI, and I'm not going to go through all of them, but I would like to focus on one in particular.
Character portraits are stupid, ugly, useless, and only prove to the world that you have no fucking clue what you're doing. It's not like character models are a mystery, you can in fact see the giant fucking eye-lazer crab you're attacking. It's also not like character models are unique enough that a portrait can become a more effective way of determining what you're targeting.
Portraits make sense in single-player games where you need to keep track of a character without using its name (i.e. any console RPG). That's just not the case here. Names are unique, and class colors tell you basically what you're targeting. They're less obtrusive, are less confusing, and just all around look better.
Every time I see some asshole put half portraits in their UI I am only reminded of some smirking fratboy who just took a picture of his drunken slut of the evening, then running around and showing it on his camera's display to all his buddies. A truly pathetic display of human failure.
What's even more obnoxious is that many of these folks think their UI is worth downloading, and once they've duped 50 14-year olds from Sweden into downloading it, they proclaim themselves Gods and continue to proliferate their garbage throughout the internet. Sounds familiar. Proof:
He's not really a perfectionist; it's obvious to even the causal gazer that his action bars aren't centered in their stupid texture. You'll find out bitch.
The Wheel is Fine, Leave it Alone
http://omgphatloots.org/UI/IDLI/Kalazar1.jpg
This is the first lesson any designer should learn: just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. There's no earthly justification for moving all of your shit to the top of the screen. His justification involved clearing out space around his "toon," but that could easily be done by making all of the absurdly large bullshit in the UI an acceptable size.
That doens't mean the cuture equivelant of UI designs shouldn't be pursued; rather, they have to actually be innovated. This is like someone wearing pants on their arms and a shirt on their legs saying "Look at me, I'm unique and innovative." Flipping current practice on its head should not be taken literally.
It's Useless
http://omgphatloots.org/UI/IDLI/Caliste.jpg
The designer of this tragedy had spent a "long time" looking for this obviously boring vector art. There isn't much justification for adding stupid bullshit like this to any user interface; it's clutter and ugly clutter at that. It's not just that this type of superfluous garbage is useless, it's actually counter productive. It's distracting, and unecessarily blocks off a part of what limited viewable space this player already had. There was a worse example of this in the thread, but I hate bullshit whispy smoke flowers so much I chose this instead.
Surprise Ending: It's not a Druid UI =O
This is Pretty Bad
http://omgphatloots.org/UI/IDLI/Gewurion.jpg
This particular UI is not necessarily the ugliest I've ever seen, but it has some pretty terrible choices regardless.
(1) Player and target frames are separated forcing the user to look all over the screen to find information which should be consolodated
(2) Shit is just way to fucking big Why does everyone have the world's widest omen display now-a-days? Can you not adjust the size (I doubt it).
(3) The color scheme is terrible; it looks like the inside of a sad mid 90's trailer home.
(4) Duplicated non-critical information in a way that doesn't promote its use (ex two sets of buffs, one on the player frame and one out in fucking Montana).
(5) A terrible font
(6) Overlapping, reduces usability and aesthetic love.
Ugh
http://omgphatloots.org/UI/IDLI/Gilher.jpg
I hate seeing things like this. It's obvious that about 15 minutes worth of scrolling through interfaces produced this pile of crap. There are like 900 things wrong with this UI, and I'm not going to go through all of them, but I would like to focus on one in particular.
Character portraits are stupid, ugly, useless, and only prove to the world that you have no fucking clue what you're doing. It's not like character models are a mystery, you can in fact see the giant fucking eye-lazer crab you're attacking. It's also not like character models are unique enough that a portrait can become a more effective way of determining what you're targeting.
Portraits make sense in single-player games where you need to keep track of a character without using its name (i.e. any console RPG). That's just not the case here. Names are unique, and class colors tell you basically what you're targeting. They're less obtrusive, are less confusing, and just all around look better.
Every time I see some asshole put half portraits in their UI I am only reminded of some smirking fratboy who just took a picture of his drunken slut of the evening, then running around and showing it on his camera's display to all his buddies. A truly pathetic display of human failure.
Total Comments 12
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You are so damn right! Some UIs use like ten different fonts and even more different bar textures too. Making a functional UI doesn't automatically mean pretty. This doesn't mean pixelperfect, I don't like pixelperfect either. It would just be enough if people would start thinking about their UI. Why do I put something into this position? When do I need it? Do I need it at all? Less is more.
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Please post your "perfect" UI for comparison
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http://omgphatloots.org/UI/Sov3.jpg
Feel free to browse the canon of my insight at the similarly themed omgphatloots.org |
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I agree for the most part, and probably 90% of the UI's I see nowadays are just the same popular UI's available for DL just slightly altered, usually in some terrible way. But theirs only so much one can do with a UI and the basics have been covered for such a long time its hard to come up with any real new and innovative things. And why do the work when theirs so many nice UI's available to just download and paste into your game?
But portraits sometimes are just a preference thing. The UI you linked with portraits showing is horrible for a 100 different reasons, but my UI has similar sized portraits and it doesn't in anyway inhibit my ability to do anything. My UI is a near copy of yours in style and looks and I created it ~2 years ago. Portraits can honestly even be helpful sometimes. As a tank when pulling a pack of mobs where some can cause the raid issues and need to have something special done to them its nice to be able to look at a mob and recognize it by face as "badass whirlwinder #567" or whatever, without having to read the of it name real quick. I don't think giving up ~200 or so pixels for portraits automatically classifies a UI as horrible. |
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I disagree, it really isn't difficult to come up with new ideas for Ui design. Yes, the large leaps and bounds have already been made by the early Ui modifiers, but that doesn't mean that there still isn't room for interpretation and improvement. Personally, I think that there is quite a handful of designers who are doing great things right now, on both sides of the pond.
And, I think you probably pointed out the only possible viable functional excuse to use portraits lol. And even if they were only used in tanking Ui's, people would probably still make them too large and zoom in so far on the image that you only saw the mob's eyes lol. That's my 2 cents! <3 Ish ps. Rob, visitor is so last year, SamsonRegular is where it's at now! :P |
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Sorry, I am probably missing something trivial, but what does the second Sovereignty(In this pic), on the top right, stand for?
edit: I mean on the target frame of course. |
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That's my target of target text. If the ToT is a non-player it shows their % health in the format NAME [HP%]
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Ahh, pretty nifty.
OnTopic: I've followed these steps(Or, atleast removed some useless panels), and all important frames are 'naked'. However, being the person I am, I preferred when they had slight touch to them - Wouldn't ones personal opinion have higher priority? I mean, does placing one panel behind the unit frames that looks(As I personally would describe it) good, and perhaps slightly distracing(Not like a rose, but more like dark lines or something more subtle) decrease functionality by a great margin? I felt kind of struck by this post, because I've tried make my unit frames look "sexy"(However, that opinion may differ from person to person) by placing elements behind the unit frames, yet still functional. (Though, I will admit I went a bit OTT with the last one I made) Sorry, just trying to understand where the line goes. |
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@phishr
I see your stuff around the community often and I must say that these: http://s.wowinterface.com/preview/pvw27305.jpg where definitely my favorite unit frames that I have seen you create. I can visualize the designs that you pull your inspiration from and I enjoyed the way you reinterpreted the designs to create your own. Unitframes are my favorite part of Ui design, and I wanted to just make some suggestions for these UF's because I think they are very "sexy" Remove the outer black border around your class colored scripted panel. Also remove those single black lines above the frames. Decrease the height of the power bar on the pet frame. Combine your lvl & name text for your Target frame. <3 Ish |
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Have to agree, I used to browse the EJ UI thread to see if I could gain inspiration for my own, but all you come across is a mix match of omen, recount, default pitbull along with some shitty hud covered in combat text which has font way too big.
Hell, half the "minimalist" ui's on wowinterface or curse are covered in shit, and nowhere near minimalistic. If you could help point me in the way to a good place to find intesperation without 15 year old mouth breathers posting every little update (oh god official wow forums) then that would be really apreciated |
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The UI threads are a cesspool of inbred stupidity.
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blah
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Updated 10/21/10 at 11:15 AM by Delorean (lol necro. *facepalm*) |
Recent Blog Entries by Sovereignty
- I Don't Love it (05/28/09)
- Min-Maxing Your UI | Part Two: Design (05/05/09)
- Min-Maxing Your UI |Part One: Introduction (04/22/09)
- Video Tutorial - PitBull4 (04/12/09)
- Action Bars Are Important, and So Are You! (04/06/09)
