Titanfall UI Analysis
This project is essentially a visualisation of part of my undergraduate thesis, which was titled:
Can the Modernist Principles Be Used In Contemporary HUD Design to Encourage Player Presence?
For my argument I compared the User Interfaces (UI) of Battlefield 3 and Titanfall. Battlefield 3 took a very modernist approach to UI design in comparison to Titanfall. After a very lengthy explanation as to why (which I won’t go into here) I closed my argument by saying that I felt that Battlefield’s UI design worked better as it adhered more strictly to the modernist principles. As a lot of my analysis was explained using visuals I thought it would be a good idea to create a portfolio piece using them.
UI Elements
Both games utilise a lot of the same elements in the heads up display (HUD), which is another reason that I chose them both for my comparison. Below you can see where I have pointed out the various elements in the Battlefield 3 HUD.
Colour Theory
As you can see the colours used to indicate the critical (i.e. enemy/dangerous) items and the status items (such as the mini-map) are not consistent across the two Heads Up Displays found in Titanfall. Therefore my first suggestion would obviously be to rectify this by making them consistent.
In the above images you can see that the team colours are not consistent across the game. In terms of brand identity this is a huge faux pas to make. The team colors are a great place to start building a brand by using two distinct colors that players will remember.
In the lobby there is again another issue with colour consistency as the header and menu items are different colors. This would not be such an issue if the header was a very obviously different color to the menu items. Using a pale blue is also too close to the teal color used for the teams.
Typography
Typography is another thing that is also inconsistent across Titanfall. The typefaces used for the HUD and the objective markers are completely different, which would be fine if there wasn't already a mix of upper and lowercase happening inside of the HUD.
The typeface that you see on the above right only ever appears on the objective markers (as far as I can tell). In my opinion, it really seems out of place as it looks like the designers have gone to serious lengths to make the game friendlier and more accessible. Their use of browns, blues and teals all hint at an attempt to create a safe, familiar brand, probably because of Titanfall's unfamiliar setting. This blocky, futuristic typeface does not fit with that.
If the designers really felt like they had to use a different typeface to the sans-serif that we see everywhere else in the game then they probably should have gone for the more obvious choice of 'Eurostile' which would still hint at it being futuristic (do we even need to hint at this point though?) rather than such an angular, boxy one.
Eurostile in various weights.
Team Color Suggestions
I would pick these (above) rather than the other lighter blue/orange combo. I think this colour combo is a little more unique. They hint at metals and rust but are still opposite from each other on the colour wheel, giving them enough contrast to be believable opposing teams. The orange is dark enough that it is almost becoming a brown, a colour with very strong connotations of humans and life, keeping the brand friendly in light of its futuristic setting.
