design
Scooter parts wound up as mirrors at Gear7 in Paris
Alex Sinh Nguyen mods games for fashion labels. With Quang Vinh Nguyen and Gabriel Hafner, the designer gave Vietnam's motorbikes the same treatment.
design
Virtual Reality
alpha_rats: Virtual reality is a dream state
Through VR experiences like Celestial Reactors, artist alpha_rats examines humanity's relationship with technology and nature while drawing inspiration from Soviet space race aesthetics and ecological concerns.
Podcast
Monument Valley's Lea Schönfelder on designing within constraints
We spoke to Lea Schönfelder, a game designer on Monument Valley 2, about the differences between games and experiences, the difficulty of designing something easy, and how limits foster elegant design.
News
Circles is a masterclass in minimalist game design
Anyone should be able to play Circles regardless of age, language, and their experience with videogames. It’s a game that has mastered the art of communicating abstract ideas to players in as minimal a way as possible. A designer’s wet dream, no doubt. At the heart of its success is tying everything
Feature
What can architects learn from No Man’s Sky?
Three years after it was initially announced at E3 2013, No Man’s Sky has officially gone gold. Few games in recent memory have created so much buzz. The near-infinite universe that No Man’s Sky offers is plenty reason to be excited but the way Hello Games is creating that universe using procedural
Feature
Announcing Issue 8.5, our new digital-only zine
Hello everyone! It’s been six months since our successful Kickstarter, and we’ve been hard at work on our first issue. Thanks to the humbling generosity of our backers, we had the opportunity to disappear and knuckle down for a while, interviewing and designing and editing and quibbling over details
News
Push Me Pull You’s long stretch to good menu design
Spending time in menus and load screens is often tedious. It can be a time of annoyance and bored Twitter refreshing. Except when it doesn’t have to be. In a blog post from House House, the creators of the recently released competitive game Push Me Pull You, the team described their different approa
News
Iron Man’s suit designer is now working on actual space suits
All space travel is fiction. Alright, it’s not fake in the “we didn’t go to the moon” sense of the term, but it necessarily involves the creation of tales to justify what remains a riotously expensive undertaking. “Major achievements in space contribute to the national prestige,” American Secretary
Feature
PlayStation 2, the videogame console from outer space
This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. /// What makes a videogame console successful? Forget about software libraries and units sold, I’m talking about the design of the actual box that you hook up to your TV. At firs
News
An appreciation of Zaha Hadid, modern architecture’s greatest woman
The architect Zaha Hadid, who died in Miami last Thursday at the age of 65, was one of design’s great optimists. Only an optimist could dream up the billowing curves of Azerbaijan’s Heydar Aliyev Center, which sprout from the ground, rise like sine curves, and blend into one another without ever mee
News
Documentary outlines how Cities: Skylines is being used to plan real cities
Having enjoyed a brief sneak-peek at Austin, Texas’ SXSW art and technology festival last weekend, My Urban Playground is an upcoming documentary from game publisher Paradox Interactive that tells the story of popular city-building game, Cities: Skylines (2015), and the fans who are using it to plan
News
Artists pick out their favorite critters from upcoming game Necropolis
It is well-known that upcoming dungeon-delving game Necropolis looks ludicrously stylish. Its stark angles, moody lighting, and cartoonishly exaggerated characters give it an aura that lies somewhere between art deco and fairy tale; as if Red Riding Hood were the emcee for a big-band show. It’s a st