HW 05 by Lee
1. Aye, I understood the reasoning behind the feedback I received. Color made sense, but perhaps the placement of the items was somewhat off, as one mostly does want to keep the bottom right clear, though games such as Halo do defy that convention for some of their elements. Perhaps I should have better designed the thruster element though, or tried to keep a little closer to the Gundam look.
2. On general notes on size and placement, I would likely keep the health and radar indicators the same, as they were fairly effective and well designed, but I have possible tweaks for the others.
Radar: While I used the head of the Strike Gundam as the template for the radar indicator (since many sensors would be in the head, ne?), I suppose that it was an inefficient use of space, and perhaps I should have remained with a standard square or circle for conservation of sceen space.
Health: I'm satisfied with how that particular one turned out, though perhaps I should have broken the health into the health of the various portions of the gundam instead of overall health. Placement, color, and style I have no color with.
Thruster & Temperature: The placement and design of this particular element was probably off. While I do think it was necessary to have the thruster bar be somewhat large in order to grab attention, perhaps it should not have been immediately under the Health indicator. It had been my opinion that this was appropriate, as the thrusters in the gundam strike are located right under the armored "skirt", but perhaps I was wrong.
Weapon indicator: I liked the use of the gun as the weapon indicator, with percentages because it was indeed an energy weapon - however, on reflection, perhaps it would have been better designed had I actually put in icons for "bullets" remaining, as it would be easier to get a visual assessment of battle conditions based on that. In terms of placement, perhaps I should have moved it closer to the top, so as not to obstruct the viewable area, such as right under the radar.
3. Vector tools were actually fairly simple to use, and I can easily see their power if I was using a tablet. In addition, the scalability and smaller amount of information is a plus if I want to export to something like Flash, say. Primarily, I used the pen tool, as it was the most versatile, creating layers, but also using it to select and deselect areas from work paths, such as when I was working on the gun shape. Fill made it easy to give the strike head radar its appearance, and I'm not sure I used stroke. All in all, it makes for clean, crisp, designs.