Interfaces 101 Making it Pretty I've made a few games which I've actually released into the wild. There's one particular issue I run into over and over, and that's the issue of the interface theme of the game. How can you make non arbitrary, consistent decisions about the look and feel and interface of your game? For example, in version one of my Silverlight chemistry based game, I made a (bad?) decision to go witha natural, landscape style look and feel, which resulted in this UI Then in a later iteration, I got smarter and went with a more "machiney," grungy look and feel, which resulted in this (final UI) I will definitely say that my taste in UI improved through iteration. But it was a result of a lot of initially arbitrary decisions followed by a lot of tweaking. Is there a better way to figure out how to theme your game? To give a parallel in writing, when you're writing a fantasy sci fi novel, there are a lot of elements you need to describe. While you can arbitrarily invent objects creatures places etc., you get a much more consistent world when you sit down for a few minutes and design the area, region, planet, or universe. Everything then fits together nicely, and you can ask yourself "how would this work in this universe? Edit It seems like I didn't explain this well. Let me simplify the question in the extreme when I need to lay out a title screen (with background, fonts, skinned buttons) how do I decide how they should look? Green or blue? Grunge or not? Rounded or flat? Serif or sans serif? Take that question and explode it into your game as a whole. How do you figure out how things should look? What process do you use to make them consistent and non arbitrary? Look at the screenshots again. I could have stuck to grass sky rocks, but metal seemed more fitting to the idea of chemical reactions and atoms.