(Please note that the VYXL newsfeed/blog has now moved to www.vyxl.co/blog)
Back in November 2017 I sent an email to Reiza Studios, offering my services to design the UI and Branding for Automobilista 2 — a title that I don’t believe was announced at the time but was very much anticipated by the Sim Racing community.
Now, here in early February 2020 and with the original Automobilista title voted #2 best Racing Sim over at Race Department I am extremely proud to have been involved on both these aspects for the forthcoming succcessor to that title (please do check out the post about the Vyxl branding for AMS2 here).
Reiza recently shared some preview images of the AMS2 UI designed by Vyxl and assisted + guided by the awesome Reiza team, so I felt it would be good to share them here on Vyxl.co too —
It’s no big secret that AMS2 is built on the foundations of the Madness Engine (Project Cars 2) so designing a fresh UI on that platform while retaining the brand feel of AMS1and delivering a contemporary appearance has been a challenge — but a highly enjoyable one at that.
As I am myself a long-term Sim Racer there was one particular design oversight made by many other Sims that I wished to ensure we avoid; placing any important buttons or information in the lower central section of the screen which is often blocked by Steering Wheels in the Players line-of-sight (a common setup for serious Sim Racers, to help the feeling of immersion).
This can be demonstrated by this early AMS2 UI mockup by Vyxl shown on my personal setup —
Above you can see the important START button bottom right, with a button cluster for Replays and Options on the bottom left, and all central textual content floated to the top of each panel accordingly: all so the Player can navigate the UI comfortable from this viewpoint without the need to crane their necks around their Wheel rim to read awkwardly-placed UI elements.
Loading Screen, with load bar across the screen top
The same design thinking is also applied to the Replay taskbar; an element that slides down from the screen top and auto-hides itself after a few seconds of Player inaction, allowing the Race replay to be fully visible —
** Please note that all the content in the images shown above is placeholder and no final Game content should be inferred **
Automobilista 2 is scheduled for release in March 2020 and Vyxl is very excited and proud to have been involved with this fantastic title.
(Please note that the VYXL newsfeed/blog has now moved to www.vyxl.co/blog)
Vyxl is hugely proud to have been involved in the AVERT platform (Adaptive Virtual Reality Training) — a live VR Training system currently being demonstrated to Police Forces around the UK.
Vyxl was involved in designing the VR-Operator UI, Location Maps and Taser Iconography for the system, which has already been demonstrated to over 60% of the UK’s Police Firearms organisations.
Check out the pretty awesome AVERT trailer above, and examples of Vyxl design work below —
Many thanks to Andrew at Oakley Mobile, Hannah Merton, and best of luck to the team demonstrating this exciting Training system around the UK.
Incredibly excited that a title I’ve been working on in secret for a few months, was announced yesterday. Automobilista (motorist in Portuguese) is a highly-regarded Sim Racing series developed by Brazilian-based Reiza Studios.
Vyxl has delivered new logotypes for the title —aka AMS2— and is working on the UI for the late-2019 launch (with some world-first design concepts, to be announced in due course).
Below you can see the logotypes, heavily inspired by (and fixing issues with) the original logo, shown bottom. Vyxl wanted to deliver a highly polished, highly recognisable motorsport-inspired identity, with the need to encapsulate the titles’ 14 characters within a recognisable silhouette for maximum readability wherever used. The master logotype even retains a horizon line, inspired by its’ predecessor. The acronym and social media badge/icons provide further flexibility for the brands’ applications across Social Media, Print and within Digital realms.
Original title logo for reference —
Reiza have created an announcement teaser featuring some of the titles new features (such as a new graphics engine including weather and day/night cycles) and of course Vyxl’s AMS2 logo design. Check it out —
Great work from all the team at Reiza, to say I’m very excited for this title would be a massive understatement!
Vyxl was recently involved in a rebrand for the 22nd Century Racing Series (’22RS’) racing game title currently in development at GOATi Entertainment in Melbourne, Australia.
Having finally caught up with the latest Star Wars latest movie ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’, I found a great article detailing the work involved to create the screen graphics within the movie.
Released today is Rockstars’ sequel to the superb Red Dead Redemption — a Vyxl favourite from way back in 2010. As part of my own work, I regularly save out examples of UI and HUD designs from titles for reference and inspiration.
While RDR and RDR2 appear to have quite ‘minimal’ and unintrusive menu systems, they are anything but simple from a design point of view, and the quality and style achieved by Rockstars’ team is superb overall.
One standout piece of UI Design are the catalogues the protagonists can peruse at many of the games’ stores —
Not only do the page designs look period-authentic but the implementation is seamless. Here’s a link to a video showing the catalogue & UI in action — (if the link doesn’t take you to the correct timestamp, jump to 1:13.45)
Although there are some very familiar examples within this article, there are a few real gems Vyxl was unaware of before – particularly the Museum Of London logo shown above/in the thumbnail. Click the image or link to see more…
Sonja Hernandez -Experience Design Manager for Brand + Icon teams at Adobe- explains the process and development of rebranding the icons for Adobes’ Creative Cloud (CC) product family, and reveals the latest changes (hint; it’s not seen in the thumbnail…).
Fourth in an ongoing series of ‘UI/Branding Teardowns’ at Vyxl. The articles in this series are not intended to be excessively deep, but focus on key aspects of a game titles’ UI and Branding; providing a summary intended for design reference. Continue reading “UI/Branding Teardown — Project Cars 2”→
Everyone loves LEGO, right? And, as one of the world’s most recognisable toy brands, its’ logo development proves pretty fascinating too. (Spoiler alert: Lego’s bricks were first plainspokenly called “Automatic Binding Bricks”).
Third in an ongoing series of ‘UI/Branding Teardowns’ at Vyxl. The articles in this series are not intended to be excessively deep, but focus on key aspects of a game titles’ UI and Branding; providing a summary intended for design reference. Continue reading “UI/Branding Teardown — Automobilista”→
Welcome to the second in an ongoing series of ‘UI/Branding Teardowns’ at Vyxl. The articles in this series are not intended to be excessively deep, but focus on key aspects of a game titles’ UI and Branding; providing a summary intended for design reference. Continue reading “UI/Branding Teardown — Assetto Corsa”→
Neat little summary article over at Polygon about the current situation with EA-Disney’s numerous Star Wars titles. With Star Wars: Battlefront 2 expected next month, it’s also sad to note the closure -yesterday- of Visceral by EA.
With the imminent release of GranTurismo Sport, Sony Interactive have released this look-back with the original team discussing their visions and methods.
Racing titles -simulations in particular- are a favourite games genre at Vyxl, and there’s no doubting Gran Turismos’ huge impact and legacy on the ‘simcade’ sector of this market.
C + R Research took a look at the logo evolutions of the biggest US brands, in relation to their revenue changes. Fun fact: Starbucks was established before Apple.
“Signs.com conducted a fascinating experiment, asking 156 people to draw 10 famous logos as accurately as possible. The only trick was, that they have to do it without any visual aids, simply from their memory…”
Welcome to the second in an ongoing series of ‘UI/Branding Teardowns’ at Vyxl. The articles in this series are not intended to be excessively deep, but focus on key aspects of a game titles’ UI and Branding; providing a summary intended for design reference. 
C + R Research took a look at the logo evolutions of the biggest US brands, in relation to their revenue changes. Fun fact: Starbucks was established before Apple.
Vyxl 
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