When it comes to UI I am a huge proponent of minimalistic and simple UI designs. I subscribe to the idea that UI should seamlessly blend with the game world, it shouldn't draw attention to itself or overpower the game visuals but instead shifts focus onto the games aesthetic and style. While this does, of course, not apply to all types of game and UI should be designed with the type of game in mind I think that a minimalist style suits my project perfectly, it's just a bonus that it's my favourite style.
Inspiration is always important for UI design, especially for me personally as it's not a sphere I am particularly comfortable. I looked to games like Skyrim which has one of my favourite interfaces and also just generally looked through google images with keyword search terms like 'minimalistic' and 'simple'. A design I found that I very much liked the look of was a design by Iuliana U on Art Station.
After this I jumped into Photoshop and just started playing around with shapes, namely squares, and lines since these were prominent shapes in the designs I liked and just put random combinations and layouts together until I had something I was happy with.
Once I had the style I was going for down I was able to very quickly bash out a 'toolkit' of sorts of images that I could import into Unity to serve any purpose I would need.
As you can see, I commited very hard to the squares and lines motif, creating an even more simplistic design than the inspiration I drew from. All remained white in Photoshop so that when imported to Unity I could change the colour to whatever I wanted very easily and without the need to go back into Photoshop and re-export.
You can see the UI in action in the video below. I think I have very successfully created what I set out to, a UI that does not draw attention to itself, showing off the game world and is also very clean and simplistic. I am very happy with what I have created.
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