NEED FOR SPEED UNBOUND
EA Criterion /
Electric Square (co-development)
2020 to 2022
Role: Senior UI Designer
OVERVIEW
I spent two years on Need for Speed Unbound as part of Electric Square's co-development work with Criterion Games, working across the UI that gives the game its identity. Unbound's defining visual idea is the collision of realistic cars and environments with hand-drawn, graffiti-style art; the UI carries that idea through every screen.
My work ran across the breadth of the game's interface: developing the overall style with the team, drawing the custom display typeface, designing the cop heat system alongside Criterion's UX designers, the event and collectible UI that structures the open world, and animation, from frame-by-frame cop effects to motion pre-vis. One game, one visual language; this page covers the lot.
FINDING THE STYLE
The challenge was legibility. Unbound's UI had to read instantly over photoreal cars and night-time streets, and it had to feel like street art at the same time; two goals pulling in opposite directions. The answer was subversion: build a slick, minimal UI that carries the information, then let the graffiti attack it. Clean type and layout do the legible work; hand-drawn marks scrawl over them, deface them, glitch them. The minimal layer keeps the game readable; the graffiti layer keeps it street.
We spent weeks gathering reference onto a shared Miro board, exploring how graffiti, hand-drawn type and street art could hold that balance. Explorations and iterations ran daily, reviewed with our art director; research became mockups, many of them, tested against real screens and real content and backed by hand-drawn animation tests, until the language held up everywhere it needed to: menus, race select, in-race HUD, transitions.
TYPEFACE
I drew the game's custom display typeface, the graffiti-style lettering that fronts Unbound's scene transitions. Every glyph was drawn by hand to keep the energy consistent across the set; the moment it starts looking like a font rather than something written on a wall, it stops working.
I built the drawn letters into a working font using the Fontself plugin for Illustrator, with extended Latin coverage for French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, including Brazilian Portuguese; every accented character drawn by hand to match, not auto-generated. Unglamorous coverage work, but it's the difference between lettering that holds up in localisation and lettering that only works in English.
THE COP HEAT SYSTEM
Working with Criterion's UX designers, I developed the look, feel and functionality of the cop heat system: the layer of UI that lets players read chase intensity at a glance. Escape and reinforcement progress bars, heat levels, and the unit screens that introduce each new escalation; when a chase is on, this is the information players steer by.
I designed the icons for all four police units: Patrol, Interceptor, Undercover and Heavy. Small marks doing a lot of work; each one has to signal an escalating threat instantly, in the corner of a player's eye, against a busy night-time screen. The behaviour matters as much as the mark: when two of the same unit join a chase, their icons layer into a single neat stack rather than stretching into a row, and when one loses the player, the stack collapses back to a single icon. Details like that keep the HUD calm while the chase gets loud.
ACTIVITIES
Unbound's open world is scattered with activities like drift zones, hot laps, long jumps, speed runs and speed traps. Gated events the player hits at full speed, with information that has to be read before the posts, not after them. I built static pre-vis for the gate layouts, working out what sat between the posts and how it read with seconds to spare; get that wrong and the player finds out what the event was once it's already over.
The feedback after the gate mattered as much as the read before it. Working with Criterion's UX designers, I shaped the layout of the results: which elements earned their place, which were cut, and how star progress lands the instant a run ends. The player should know how they did before they've lifted off the throttle.
THE OPEN WORLD
Lakeshore is dotted with collectibles, and I designed the icons and reward panels that confirm each find: Bear Champs, collected by driving into a graffiti-style bear; street art, by driving into a stepladder stacked with paint tins; billboards, by driving into billboards. Small pieces of UI with one job; make a two-second pickup feel worth the detour.
Late in production, with all hands on deck, I produced event panels for the map screen. I worked in engine, framing cars and locations: moving the camera, adjusting the lighting, taking the shot, then cropping it to sit right in the panel and adjusting levels in Photoshop. The car panels shown here are the ones I scribbled over myself.
ANIMATION AND MOTION DESIGN
I made the animations in the cop experience, each one drawn frame by frame. My favourite is the chain snapping when a player shakes off a pursuing car; a hand-drawn burst in the game's graffiti language that tells you, in a fraction of a second, that you're free. The pre-vis I built for the icons and progress bars in After Effects carried through to the shipped game largely unchanged.
For the character select screen, building on another UI designer's screen design, I developed the motion in After Effects pre-vis: characters coming on, colour glitch as they land, type shifting in the background. The shipped screen kept that foundation, implemented in engine by UI tech artists and engineers. I built a similar pre-vis for the car select screen.
OUTCOME
Need for Speed Unbound shipped in December 2022 with the street-art style as its signature; the thing people remember about the game is the thing the UI team spent two years building. My contribution runs through it: the style development, the typeface on every transition, the cop heat system, the event and collectible UI across the open world, and the animations that carry the cop experience.
Two years, one visual language; research, type design, UX, icons and hand-drawn animation, all in service of a single idea that shipped.
© 2022 Electronic Arts Inc.
EA, the EA logo, Need for Speed, the Need for Speed logo, Criterion and the Criterion logo are trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc.
Selected Works
TIDY GIZMO
Jack Hooker · UI Designer