I had the incredible good fortune of being born in the 80’s into a family that owned a personal computer; the redoubtable Commodore 64. I distinctly remember being young enough to have to climb into the chair, but wily enough to remember the magical LOAD”*”,8,1 to make all those incredible and inscrutable games work. This must have been age four, five if we’re generous. And fourish-fiveish me was hooked.
But it was only until that crazy Qbasic game with the gorillas on skyscrapers that tossed bananas at each other (Gorillas.bas if we’re being pedantic) that I realized I wanted to make games. After innumerable play-throughs, I thought it would be infinitely cooler if the gorillas could scale the building first while throwing bananas at each other, then reach the top and battle once more. I wanted to see the idea so badly that I just decided to try to make the damn thing. So began a lifelong love affair with game design (among a host of other things). Now, Artificial Intelligence is a pretty tall order for your average elementary school student to tackle, but the message to me was clear: I had a vision, and the impulse was to make that vision spectacular.
It’s been some time since I’ve been that starry-eyed boy leafing through shareware game magazines on his stomach, caught in a beam of afternoonlight, but good lord, if that kid could see me now. I’ve been making games for nearly fifteen years now as a User Interface Artist and User Experience Designer (and sometimes Art Director and Creative Director). The surreality of being one of the people who will influence and inspire some little kid who was just like me is never lost on me, even during crunch. So now, ages later, there is a new vision: to help other people realize their visions.
As an in-house Interface Designer for Midway Games, Electronic Arts, id Software and Glu Mobile, you constantly saw challenges that baffled even the sturdiest of UX minds and terrified the boldest of UI hearts. How are going to make all these wireframes in time? We have to do 100 icons? Maybe we can split the art pass of the HUD and pause menu into teams? It’s engaging work, absolutely, but User Interface art and User Experience design is also, frankly, lethally difficult work, too. When a programmer makes a mistake, maybe an exploit is born for a speed-runner. If a 3D modeler makes a mistake, well, now there’s one bad looking tree among thousands. If UI / UX makes a mistake, you miss your ship window.
That’s a million-dollar mistake, by the way.
Now consider a world absent that User Interface artist or User Experience Designer altogether and how mercilessly damaging that would be for a project. Dear reader, I don’t have to imagine, because quite a few projects come to me where almost all the original work has to be stripped out — and as I’m scuttling broken pixels and errant lines of code, I can’t help but think to myself how much farther they’d be, how much more confident they’d present and how much more aggressively their game could spellbind the public. This work of mine is less a force of altruism (although I love helping), but more an officious shaking-my-damn-head act of mercy.
Your ideas, your visions, your games (that you are taking oh so very seriously) deserve to be realized at their absolute pinnacle. You shouldn’t have to compromise, whether it be an indie game or a AAA international release, a work has your named emblazoned upon it, and you most certainly should never feel imperiled by it. You have a vision, and that vision deserves to be spectacular.
I am thrilled and honored to serve as a User Interface Design consultant and art outsourcer for companies great and soon-to-be-even-greater. If you have a longterm or immediate need for User Interface art and User Experience design, you have come to the right place.
The downtown Chicago-based studio is geared towards rapid art outsourcing and strong communication. Whether we’re throwing icons and logos at each other over Drive and Dropbox, presenting UI wireframes over Hangouts, or answering questions over Slack on the phone, I can provide the full-breadth and depth of UI design. Always available to listen, and evergreen in my love of making you look good, please don’t hesitate to contact me with some details or questions about your project.
So that’s pretty much my story. What’s yours?
