Developing your visual vocabulary

A polished looking game is one with visual consistency across its art and graphic design. But how do you achieve that visual consistency? It’s all about developing your visual vocabulary.

Think of the art for your game as a language.

Think of the art for your game as a language. Languages require grammar and a vocabulary and you can also communicate through your art by using the same concepts. The visual grammar is basically a set of rules that define what is and isn’t allowed in your visual style, and the vocabulary is the set of various elements that abide by these rules. Let’s talk about some examples.

Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering has had a long history of art and design. With over 20 years of content, they’ve certainly developed a few rules over time. For example, dragons always have arms, all angels are female, and all demons are male. What’s interesting is that MTG releases new sets of cards all the time, and they take that opportunity to move from world to world, which gives them a chance to explore multiple visual languages. They also employ many different artists and in order to maintain that visual consistency, enforcing a set of visual rules is important to keeping each set feel cohesive.

Even though each card features a different artist, they remain consistent due to a shared visual vocabulary.

In the Theros block, they introduced the new concept of a card that was both a creature and an enchantment. To reinforce that concept, they developed a visual vocabulary where each of these enchantment creatures would be represented with a sparkly constellation pattern. They extended this element onto the card frame as well, which is used exclusively for enchantment creature cards. Even the art for each card features a different artist, they still look like they are part of the same world.

Bant is white-aligned with blue and green as secondary colors. You can still tell that Rhox Charger is a Bant card due to its visual language despite being a completely green card. Once again, visual consistency despite featuring all different artists.

In the Shards of Alara block, each “shard” had its own color identity and visual vocabulary. In particular, the Bant shard (my favorite) is white-aligned and features a lot of bright and glorious light. They also use sigils (medallions) as part of their visual vocabulary. The Esper shard features artifacts with intricate metalwork. Each shard also featured secondary colors and because of the visual language, you could tell if a card was from the Bant shard even if it wasn’t a white card. This was further reinforced mechanically in gameplay as well.

A visual language can do more than provide consistency — it can provide cues as to how the card works.

Power Grid

Power Grid is a game with a very distinctive style. That distinctive style stems from a set of heavily enforced visual rules. In Power Grid, there are various types of power plants that range from renewable resources to nuclear to coal burning.

Sampling of various power plants.

Just from this small sample of cards, you can already quickly identify some of the rules of the visual language. The illustrations are drawn using black outlines, the buildings are drawn with an isometric viewpoint, and the colors are fairly muted in general. The black outlines are also applied to the iconography to further solidify the look.

Once you start looking at each type of power plant, you start to identify the vocabulary that is distinct to each type. Cleaner sources of energy like nuclear or renewable have bluer skies. The garbage power plants always give off yellow smoke. These consistent elements help players categorize cards. Players are always looking for patterns and every visual element can be a clue to seeing these patterns.

Fantastic Factories

Finally, my game Fantastic Factories enforces a lot of rules for the sake of visual consistency. Here are a few rules, for example:

• Smokestacks are red (usually) and feature an orange rim.
• Smoke and clouds are represented using the same kinds of shapes.
• Each building has clouds in the background to provide scale.
• Only a very limited color palette is allowed to be used.
• No line strokes around shapes are allowed in the art.
• Black strokes are primarily reserved for iconography.
• Roundness is represented by shading half of the shape darker.
• Corners of buildings often have “fins”.
• Layered buildings cast a 45 degree shadow to the right.
• Solid colors and the occasional gradient only. No textures.

Each art piece should have its own character but belong to the same world at the same time.

At first it may seem overwhelming to have so many rules, but it ensures that your art and design maintains a consistent look. It can actually become easier to do the art when you already know what elements are or are not allowed. In fact, as Mark Rosewater has famously said, “Restriction breeds creativity.” Having rules forces you to dive deeper to explore the limits of what those rules will allow.

Conclusion

In the end, this established visual language is what gives many games its style and character. Visual consistency can immerse your players into the world of your game. Without it a game can look chaotic, so make sure to define the language, and stick with it!

If you are interested in reading more about the graphic design of games, check out my post about the anatomy of a card. Also feel free to follow us on Facebook and/or Twitter.