Written by Louis Kocmick & Jasmin Kharamani
Welcome to an inquiry of graphic design’s move into the game engine and onto the grid. A move from XY to XYZ: paper becomes screen, surface becomes landscape, elements become characters, foliage (i), props – white space becomes air, void. A move in which Stepping Onto the Grid explores the navigable game space and its implications for image production: implications that oblige us, the graphic designers, to reconsider our decision-making processes. If we once concerned ourselves with which typeface to choose, we now have to figure out which skeletal rig (ii) fits our main characters best.
What you’ve now entered is a microcosm that seeks to unfold the above mentioned. A recursion made comprehensible through Unreal Engine (iii), as image-producing apparatus. The microcosm itself, a selfenclosed design system. Between its blades of grass, you will find infinite directions to move yourself along. No walk through will ever be the same. Here you will become both world-builder and forager of imagery – simultaneously extracting images while you traverse and terraform the landscape. You will, together with us, try to navigate these new worlds and their possibilities within our discipline. A discipline that at this point might be neighbouring sculpture (iv), gardening (v), and ecology (vi). A development that has not only arisen as a consequence of recent technological developments but also due to the importance of continually examining our field and the possibilities that come with it. We welcome you to Stepping Onto the Grid.
1559 marked the year when Earth was rendered navigable through projection from XYZ to XY, the Mercator map. Earth’s shape transformed from sphere to plane in the Western mind – a coordinate grid – world as a graph for marine navigation. So called »operative« or »artificial flatness« (1). With Mercator, ‘Earth’ was moved from an external experience into the mind as a flat image of the ‘enlightened’ western man (2). It signified the path of convergence towards reassembling the world into a world of representations. Ever since, this logic has been carried out across books, music sheets, iconography, databases, websites, and so forth – the act of distilling the essence of complex concepts in order to present it as a graphic representation.
Today one may argue that graphic design stands before a transposition replacing the edges of the paper with the borders of the game space. A space wherein worlds are constructed from 0s and 1s within the engine room of the computer. These worlds arise from the aforementioned map, which once again finds its three dimensionality. Here the flat map – referred to as UV (vii) – reveals itself as contorted polyhedrons, crunched together to conform to a rectangular grid. An incomprehensible flat image made with the sole purpose of being projected onto a three dimensional mesh. As we have historically used maps to render the world comprehensible, the engine uses maps to render the world. Through this reversion, the UV map becomes a symbolic representation of this divergence from the reproduced world towards ‘the produced world’ – a world constructed in the game engine.
These worlds are navigable to the designer by utilising the same control framework as a game player. Using WASD-keys and mouse to orient and move makes designing within this engine an act of ‘gaming’. When working with traditional compositions, the designer is placed outside of the area they are composing. When working on a microcosm the designer is placed within the world as a game actor themselves. This re-animation of graphic design contributes to a new dimension that gives the designer an opportunity to live and relive the world, its props and characters – from different angles, in different light settings, through shifting distances. The area in which information is conveyed becomes a world of information. Opposite the traditionally two-dimensional artboard we look upon from one perspective, the worlds made in the game engine present themselves through a controllable perspective – hiding the ‘borders’ of the composition and thus making the composition transition into a state of Cosm (viii) – a world built around the designer and not in front of them. Within this construct the designer can essentially extract images, going beyond the idea of composing what needs to be within the edges of the composition.
Perceived as three dimensional environments, the game engine itself lives behind the screen: A terrarium-like setting – a peek into an untouchable yet feelable microcosm – a visual, yet haptic experience. Let us not view the screen as a border, but rather accept its role as an invisible veil, translating the database of the game engine into a perceivably living world. Living due to its autonomous characters, performing their behaviour independently of the player – creating complex cause and effect loops. Wind moving through grass. Turbulent dust particles obscuring the lens. Light setting behind the horizon.
Generally, one could say that the image production landscape we stand before today comes with a strongly increased complexity. Not only does the engine contain an increased amount of technical possibilities, its images also suggest references and meanings that extend beyond their mere function. They are not solely a representation of direction leading to the nearest exit. Rather they make us lose our sense of what is purely visual in intricate image-to-reality fragments and moments. Simulations that evoke a sense of familiarity, yet avoids precise identification in the moment. This increased complexity requires the designer to transcend visuality in worldbuilding: dealing with narratives, ideas of culture, eco-systems, character relations, and inter-object connections, even soundscapes. There is a relatedness at play; as trees cluster together, they become forests.
Forests born out of the grid: a pinnacle of contemporary graphic design history (ix.), ever-present, through columns of text, placement of images, and the rhythm of the composed surface. Previously visible, it now hides from plain sight of the designer in the game engine. The grid is brick, gridiron, map, type, screen, network (3) – an organisable template for designers to build from. While still present in game space, it has stepped away from the spotlight. In the translation along the X and Z-axis, the surface within, becomes navigable distances; plains to traverse. Along the Y-axis; hills, skies, above us, canyons, oceans, below. A coordinate system that keeps expanding infinitely. In order for it to feel like a world, the designer must structure the props in a relational way rather than aligning elements to lines or guides. The game engine grid becomes directional: left, right, front, back, up, down – the alignment guides are now entities from the past.
Thankfully we are not making our farewells with graphic design as it has been. Instead, we aim to start a dialogue highlighting the importance of comprehending qualities we may overlook due to our repeti-tive routines. A stagnation that can result in us mindlessly working within the same environments. Game engines, much like all other tools of the graphic designer, dictate form. Its in-built logics and structures create particular image types with specific aesthetics, in the same way the printing press and the vector-based artboard do and have done. This can hopefully be a vessel for a conversation regarding the tools (new and old) presented to the designer – reminding us of their influence on form, aesthetics and style; essentially their power over how we structure information and communicate visually, whether through typography, illustration or video game characters.
1 Krämer, S. (2021). From Dissemination to Digitality. Media Theory Journal, 2021 (Vol. 5, No. 2).
2 Kjær, M. (2020). På kanten af en skrøbelig verden. In M. Kjær, & T. Ø. Pedersen (eds.). Navigeringer på kanten af en verden i forandring. Aarhus Universitetsforlag.
3 Higgins, H. B.. (2009). The Grid Book. The MIT Press.
i. Foliage in Unreal Engine is a system for creating and managing vegetation like trees and grass. It lets developers quickly place plants, optimize performance, animate them with wind, and generate them procedurally for realistic environments.
ii. Game rigging is an essential component of eliciting realistic movement and action in digital figures for computer or console games. This process often starts with a basic skeleton that animators can apply game rigging techniques to so that they can control an object's movement
iii. Unreal Engine is a game engine that is widely used for developing video games. It is also used in various industries for real-time 3D visualization, virtual production, and simulation.
iv. Sculpture since the game engine requires the crafting of 3d-sculpted objects. The designer shapes objects spatially.
v. The gardener tends and cultivates a garden, much like the designer arranges objects inside the 3d environment.
vi. Ecology as in the study of the relationship between living organisms and their environment.
vii. UV mapping is the process of generating a 2D representation of a 3D object. This 2D representation is constructed from UV coordinates, which are commonly known as texture coordinates.
viii. As in microcosm: a little world; a world in miniature. [Dictionary.com]
ix. Referring to graphic design manuals such as Müller-Brockmanns Grid Systems.