Dragon Age: Origins
Role: Lead UI/UX Artist
Studio: BioWare
Platform: PC / Console
Release Year: 2009
Project Overview
Dragon Age: Origins is a dark heroic fantasy RPG rooted in deep narrative, strategic combat, and expansive world-building. As Lead UI/UX Artist, I was responsible for developing an interface that conveyed complex game mechanics and story systems through a cohesive, immersive, and accessible visual language.
Design Goals
Diegetic Immersion: Build a UI system that visually belongs in the game’s world—a medieval-inspired tome of knowledge and magic.
Combat Clarity: Allow players to quickly assess party health, resources, and status in real-time combat.
Narrative Readability: Deliver large volumes of lore and dialogue in a digestible and engaging way.
Typographic Harmony: Ensure typography served both aesthetic and functional roles across languages and platforms.
Diegetic Book Interface
Challenge:
Representing intricate game systems—inventory, dialogue trees, codex lore, talent specs—within a diegetic design, while maintaining ease of use.
Solution:
I designed a parchment-and-ink interface grounded in medieval visual motifs. The entire UI system was framed as a living book: aged textures, organic borders, and scripted visual elements evoked a hand-crafted tome while still enabling players to access deep RPG systems. Menus unfurled like pages, and UI transitions mimicked turning parchment.
Communicating Player State in Combat
Challenge:
With up to four active party members and a dynamic combat system, we had to show vital data (health, mana, buffs/debuffs) clearly without cluttering the screen.
Solution:
Created custom character portraits with adjacent health/mana bars and easily scannable status icons.
Designed radial cooldown indicators to quickly show ability readiness.
Audio and VFX cues reinforced UI states—characters would grunt when low on health, or blink red for critical moments.
Supported tactical pause view with clean overlays to manage spells, aggro, and positioning efficiently.
Typography Collaboration with external partner
Challenge:
We needed a custom font solution that supported the game’s fantasy setting while ensuring maximum legibility and full localization support across multiple languages.
Solution:
I worked closely with renowned typographer Ray Larabie to refine and extend a custom display typeface tailored to Dragon Age’s aesthetic. This included:
Adjusting glyph details for enhanced legibility at small UI sizes.
Creating alternate weights and styles for different systems (dialogue vs. codex vs. HUD).
Expanding the character set to support international localization (e.g., Cyrillic, accented Latin, and extended symbols).
The result was a font that not only visually anchored the game’s medieval tone, but functioned beautifully across all supported territories.
Process & Tools
Prototyped UI flows in Flash and internal layout tools.
Collaborated with system designers, narrative leads, and engineers to align on functionality and lore tone.
Regularly iterated based on internal QA and usability feedback.
Outcome
The UI/UX system for Dragon Age: Origins was widely praised for its blend of aesthetic immersion and mechanical clarity. The "book interface" became a hallmark of the franchise. Our Codex and combat HUD design laid the foundation for RPG interfaces that followed. The custom typography collaboration ensured the visual language carried across borders and screens.
