Plan for Channa Gilchrist

#1 There is no life to the GUI, everything is square...

#2 agreed, seems like you're just using photoshop which is severely limiting creative possiblities. are you trained with illustrator too? I think that would give your arsenal a big boost.

#3 i like the third one. in my opinion theyre all very nice title screens and i can only hope to have something which looks half as good. but whats with the dirty black lines in all of them? it almost makes me want to grab a rag and wipe the monitor...

#4 Looks MUCH better than your previous ones. :)

#5 it's like comparing apples to apples of different shades. it would be nice if you had radically different options to choose from.

of course, you probably already did these types of choices and ended up with this as the best style, but on the offchance that you didnt, that's my suggestion.

#6 Yea I have been working on several but this one seemed to work closer to what my teamates and I were looking for, but still open to any suggestions as I continue to refine for the final

#7 I would go for a more electronic look. like a futurist computer terminal look. I would use rectangles with one corner as a slope.

#8 In my opinion there seems to be something lacking, I dont know what it is it just doesnt seem right.
However i have noticed a theme with the above images and that is the colour scheme,
blue, white, grey and black, apart from one image which has some beige in it.
I did a quick google search for menu design and found this site www.webcraftscreations.com
they basically design websites and such, but it doesnt stop you taking ideas from them for your
own menus, banners, logos and the like. www.web-crafts.biz/ has a similiar colour scheme
to yours which you may find usefull (or maybe not).

#9 I really like #3 and #4. Nice contrast.

#5 is a little better balanced, but it's still off a bit. The title needs a balancing element in the lower-right. Maybe the exit button should go down there?

The scratch / dirt marks really add a lot of character.

The background is a little "empty" but that might be all you have to work with right now. Once you get more from the game it might be nice to see a building in the background... if you placed the building so it took up about 1/3 of the screen in the lower-right area that might help balance things without any other adjustments.

I'm not an artist or anything, so take my advice with a grain of salt :P Overall it's looking good... even without any changes it's looking better than some main screens I've seen.

#10 Channa,
IMO, you should not use :
- square buttons with border.
- a very (too much) classic font.
- a very (too much) simple background image (with a "html like" border!).

I don't like to use game screenshots for a GUI, but it's a very subjective decision.

A GUI must be a little world, and it must reflect the game background.
Take a look at the MiniOne Racing MainMenu : www.frogames.com/images/ui1.jpg
The game is a tiny cars racing game, and that is what the GUI reflects.
If you download a few game demos, you will note that only the game environment and the plateform (which imposes navigation's constraints) affect the GUI.

Hope that's help

Christophe

#11 wow that is alot of feed back and very helpful, thanks for the sites as referance too, its will help bunches, I will take all this and keep it going, and if anyone has more thoughts feel free to let me know this is great! Thanks again everyone for your opnions and help. :)

#12 Guis:
Overall needs more contrast. Try designing the thing in grayscale first to make sure it's legible. The screenshots look 'disabled' and dark.

Portfolio cover:
Your name in the portfolio cover looks blurry. Again, avoid styles and filters, they look unprofessional.
The feather (?) looks blurry also (dropshadow?)

Your name's font looks vertically stretched or your leading is too tight. The text also crowds the borders of the negative space created by the black around it.

You asked for it ! :) Keep going, youre on the right track.

#13 The only thing I can say is that, like Jason said, they are strikingly similar. So to say which ones are best would be quite difficult, since they vary so little from each other. Like I told you earlier, I like the way the game title looks, so I would keep that. However, the rest of the GUI is a little plain, so I would suggest adding some more detail work to it. Also, I am not sure what the picture in the background has to do with your game (although I know it is a shot from one of your levels, most people wouldn't know that, since they didn't watch you develop it). So, I would choose a more appropriate background, something that would convey something about the game, because the purpose of a glacial wasteland is a little hard to discern. Maybe take a shot of one of your cities and add an explosion or something...just something to get across some info about the game. Have fun

#14 Oh, and also, I hope that isnt your real phone number that you just posted online in plain view for anyone to get... since you dont know what kind of wierdos will be seeing this thread - imo I would take it off

#15 Great progress so far, look forward to seeing even more plans with more pics on how this GUI ends up.