Games and Play
Small pictures handled again and again, where the imagery is inseparable from the rules of play and instant recognition is the governing design requirement.
Dictionary entry
- Playing Card Design 15th century– / Style
The 52-sheet design polished by centuries of use: double-ended court cards, the semiotics of suits, repeating back patterns. Wear and recognition produced a completeness that is also the prehistory of UI design.
- Tarot Imagery 15th century– / Style
From the Visconti gold grounds through Marseille woodcuts to the Waite-Smith narrative scenes: allegory systematized into 78 cards. Its openness to rereading keeps drawing designers in.
- Hanafuda 18th century– / Style
Japanese cards that compress twelve months of flowers, birds, wind and moon into 48 sheets. Their bold flat-color stylization against black came out of a long history of redesigning the deck to slip past bans, and it was where Nintendo began.
- E-Sugoroku Edo period– / Layout
Japan's pictorial board sheets dividing one page into a story of squares. Careers and pilgrimages arranged in spiral progressions show the sugoroku sheet as ancestor of information design and game UI.
- ADV / NVL Text Layout 1990s– / Layout
The visual novel has two named text layouts, of which ADV mode presents dialogue and narration one line at a time, generally in a window at the bottom of the screen. NVL mode presents several lines at once in a window that takes up the entire screen and starts a fresh page at marked breaks. The Ren'Py documentation defines the pair in exactly those terms.