ABOUT
Hi, I'm Jack, a UI Designer with over 20 years in professional design, the past 10 in game UI and UX; Tidy Gizmo is my portfolio. My craft centres on icons, typography and layout.
On an unreleased mobile title, currently under NDA, I created art for a set of mini-games, built wireframes and clickable prototypes in Figma, and produced animation work in both Figma and Unity. I also partnered with the tech director to get Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic type rendering correctly in engine.
I spent two years on Diablo IV (Blizzard) as part of Electric Square's co-development team: six months authoring the world map's vector spline system, then a large body of icon work spanning launch and five seasons of live content. As the team expanded, I built the documentation that brought new designers up to speed; Confluence guides, video walkthroughs with subtitles and cheat sheets; then user-tested it by watching a new artist work through it, revising until the friction disappeared.
On Need for Speed Unbound (EA Criterion), I shaped the look and feel of the game's street-art UI alongside a team of UI artists and designers, and drew the game's custom display typeface, extended Latin accents included. Working with Criterion's UX designers, I developed the look, feel and functionality of the cop heat system, letting players read chase intensity at a glance: cop icons, escape and reinforcement progress bars, and hand-drawn graffiti-style animations, like the chain snapping when a player shakes off a pursuing car.
On Warped Kart Racers, a short assignment covering the game's new Arcade mode, I partnered with a technical designer to take screens from wireframe to final art, delivering layouts and icons.
I shipped Forza Street (Xbox Game Studios), my first game title, touching almost every screen and UI component at some point: layouts from daily login to challenge flows, badges, icons, background and panel UI art.
TIDY GIZMO
Jack Hooker · UI Designer