Client: Guerrilla Games
Project: Horizon Forbidden West
Scope: In-game icon design
During the pandemic a friend called with a question. Did working on the new Horizon game sound good?
Guerrilla Games, one of Sony PlayStation's flagship studios, was deep in production on Horizon Forbidden West. They needed someone to design in-game icons. Hundreds of them.
Growing up with consoles and the early internet, this was not a brief you think about for long.
The work was precise and systemic. Icons that had to function at small sizes, stay consistent across a vast game world and feel native to the visual language Guerrilla had built. There is no room for loose thinking at this scale. Every icon is a small decision that a player encounters without noticing -- and that invisibility is the point.
Working inside a large production team on something this scale is a different discipline from running your own projects. The craft is the same. The collaboration is different. The stakes are higher in the sense that millions of people will eventually use what you made, even if they never know your name.
Horizon Forbidden West shipped in 2022. The icons are still in the game.