HW 05 by Brian Abrams
1) I generally understood the reasoning behind the comments received on my assignment 02. It is relatively evident that the color scheme is not very consistent. The outer glow used on the Health icon and radar do not match. The placement for each of these items seems fine, since you usually want to keep the bottom right side of the screen clear. The size of each element was ok, but I could have made the Health icon noticeably larger than the weapons indicator.
2) As a whole, the definite size of each GUI element seems to work as a system. However, it may not be obvious to the player which GUI info is most important. The health should be a bit larger than the weapons indicator. I would compensate for the unused space in the weapons GUI. I would make the radar a little smaller, too.
The placement of each GUI element seems to work fine. I might end up moving the thruster gauge flush against the radar, as if the two were attached. I wouldn't necessarily move any of the other GUI elements.
The overall color that was intended to be used was an opaque dark grey, metallic kind-of look. I didn't do very well bringing this out. I tried using this scheme on the radar and weapons indicator, but I couldn't figure out how to consistently use it for things like the thruster and the health because I had used gradient fills. The outer glow on the health doesn't seem consistent, nor does the light blue outline of the thruster gauge. I would figure out how to stay consistent even when adding effects to specific GUI elements.
The iconography that I used was OK, referring to the health and the weapons indicator. However, on the radar, perhaps I could have used different shaped enemy indicators instead of dots. Also, perhaps I could have figured out an icon to use for the thruster gauge, since the gradient fill doesn't seem to fit the style/color scheme.
I thought that the style was generally pretty good on my layout. There were some issues with color and consistency, but I liked the hexagon radar and how the thruster gauge is a piece of the radar and can be attached. With some cleaning up of my Photoshop skills, hopefully I can figure out an easy way to keep consistency.
3) My experience with Photoshop was pretty frustrating as it usually is. I had trouble keeping the GUI elements consistent because I couldn't figure out how to adjust the effects of images to meet my needs. Also, it kept rasterizing my images whenever I wanted to fill in an image with a color. As a result, I couldn't get my paths to save. The tool which proved most helpful/simple for me was the Pen Tool, which I have used much before. I also worked with the custom shape tool, and added layer effects (or tried to). The selection tool came in pretty handy as well when trying to edit specific parts of each GUI element.