Some examples are below:

Prints available from www.shoottheglass.bigcartel.com.

It seems obviously targeted at people learning German as the whole book is in dual languages but the way they’ve done it is quite cool. Text will be written on the page in one language, and then there are semi-opaque overlays with the corresponding translation on top, so you can test yourself on it. For a freebie, its really nicely made, and I can’t believe that dual layer process is that cheap to do. It’s definitely something I’ll hang on to.

Gaming is now a major part of the entertainment industry, I can remember GTA IV not just being the best selling game of all time, but the best selling entertainment product too. Gamers are aging and maturing, people in their thirties and forties are still actively playing, people with careers and families. We’re not all pubescent teenagers any more so why do hardware manufacturers think we are? I don’t want to have to go into a shop to buy a piece of computer equipment and feel embarrassed when I reach the checkout holding a box with some scantily-clad dragon-lady on the front. They seem to believe that on the shop shelf, the box with the most metallic space hippos is the one customers will go for. In fact most of them are probably sold online now, unless you feel like paying PC World tax.

For me, I’d always be attracted to a more simple functional design. It’s one front that I think Apple has got so right it hurts. Although they brand themselves as more of a separate boutique style computing experience, the increasing popularity and increasing 3D capability of Macs means they are taking more of a slice of the gaming market, so they’re not entirely dissimilar. Their packaging design however is always drop-dead gorgeous. Admittedly the asthetics of Apple hardware play a large part in it, and I admit that as a PC user, no fanboyism here. Few other manufacturers can claim as many packaging and unboxing photos on Flickr as Apple does.

Anyway, here’s some particularly sadly average horrid packaging designs I’ve found all too easily:

An indian angel woman poking an exploding skeleton in the back.

An angry dragon man.

Generic knight monster thing.

Robot Space Frog.

Robot boobs.

You the man now dog!

Jesus wept.

The fact they they still look amazingly futuristic today gives some idea how they must have seemed when they first appeared in the 1950s. To many people at the time, this was the iconic image of what a bomber looked like:

Now imagine how people must have felt when this came screaming over their heads:

At that time they were painted in bright white too, to reflect some of the heat from a nuclear detonation, with the familiar red white and blue roundels lightened to pink and baby blue to stop roundel shaped holes being burnt into the aircraft.

I think mindset of the men who flew these white behemoths is fascinating. Set on alert, awaiting the order for a counter-strike, knowing they probably didn’t have a great chance of survival, and even if they lived, who knew the horrors that awaited them back home. Sitting in their huge planes, looking out of tiny windows, carrying a nuclear missile so big it had to be strapped to the outside.

Anyway enough of the history lesson, there were some designy things that inspired me to write this. I came across the Flight Global archive which has scans of their old issues throughout the century, including adverts. I’m not sure entirely who they were aimed at, but I love combination of early British modernist graphic design and modernist aircraft design, plus the whole idea of branding a nuclear delivery system designed to kill millions of people. Here’s a few of my favourites:

So I’m pretty excited for the new version coming out this year, not only do the cars look amazingly good, the whole user interface design seems to have stepped up too. From a video I watched, the developers wanted to give the game the feel of a luxury car brochure and it definitely feels like it has matured from the previous version. We now have less brash colours – it’s the cars that deserve to stand out, not the interface – and it just feels much more pleasant and relaxing, although the music helps there too. There’s a lot more generous spacing going on, with the type being set more consistently.

I wouldn’t say that Forza 2’s interface was badly designed – I never had any troubles with its usability – but sometimes things felt a little crowded, a little over-designed and there was always a slight boy racer feel to proceedings.

Part of this new maturity is probably due to HDTV becoming more the norm. I don’t know what the statistics are but I don’t believe it’s even possible to buy a standard definition telly above 20″ these days, and it has been that way for a while.

The extra pixel count allows them to have more control and refinement when setting type. The whole art direction is simpler, but because of that it feels a lot more confident, like it has finally come of age. Sure, we were boy racers once but now we’ve grown up a bit and can start enjoying the finer things in life.

(Yes I’m aware of the maturity of painting video game characters on your car.)

On the opposite side of this is Colin McRae Dirt 2. Whilst Forza 3 goes for the serious understated reserve of a luxury marque, Dirt 2 aims squarely at the fun-loving, extreme sports-watching, energy drink-guzzling, MTV youth culture. When in reality most people’s experience of rallying has more to do with sitting on a cold wet hilltop waiting for a car to blast round a corner and cover you in mud, this more glitzy fantasy rallying is much more enticing and I think it looks fantastic.

You can see how much thought has gone into the interface, in that it integrates with this 3d-world menu system. There’s none of Forza 3’s restraint here, it’s all full-on and in your face, with luminous green filled-in chunky serif type popping out into the world and continuing into the game itself tying the whole thing together. It’s not all mish-mashed together either, you can see the typographic and colour consistency at work and there’s probably a huge style guide behind it all.

I think both these games show the increasing attention to detail that goes into current gen game interface design and the increasing role that graphic design has in the games industry.

As a final horror story I’ll end with a screenshot of one of my favourite games – Trackmania Nations. This is a free multiplayer time-trial style game, where up to about 30 people drive round a track at once (with collisions disabled) and the person who gets the fastest time in the allotted timelimit wins. It’s not uncommon to be playing on a server with people from at least 10 different countries at the same time, and it’s fiendishly addictive. The worst thing about it through is the server mods that install their own little user interface crammed around the existing game one. This coupled with some people’s penchant for brightly coloured names means that this can happen:

Whoever thought that this looked good?