Hi, my name is Simon Meyer, and I’ve been working on the UI and graphic design for Inconvenience Store! I’ve been creating 2D assets such as button prompts, icons, and other designs for our fictional store, Happy Mart. One task I worked on is the branding guide for Happy Mart, which helped guide the early stages of figuring out our game’s setting.
Moodboards showing image collections of retro grocery store interiors and discontinued cereal boxes
For the branding guide, I did a lot of visual research on retro grocery store interiors and product packaging. We agreed on emulating a 90s store, so I based my research off of that era. (Some 70s and 80s stuff snuck in anyways though!) Discontinued cereal brands have lots of wacky colors and designs that were super fun to pull inspiration from. I wish the Nerds cereal still existed! I wonder how much sugar was in each serving...
Early logo concepts for Happy Mart, color and font exploration
After gathering inspiration from sugary breakfast cereals, I started to create some ideas for what this store’s logo would look like. I grabbed a bunch of bizarre fonts to test out - many of which look pretty ugly when compared to today’s design trends - and started sketching away! Lots of iteration was done on fonts, colors, and design style as well. Our favorite ended up being the red and green bar based off a food court sign from one of the moodboards above. See if you can find it!
Final Happy Mart and game logo
This led to the Happy Mart logo’s final version, where funky colors meet slightly distorted text. The store’s apple mascot has become a team favorite. We turned it into an emoji for our Discord server, and often joke about its eyes staring deep into our souls. When I created the title logo for Inconvenience Store, I decided to keep the colors consistent. Plus, making chunky 3D letters is fun!
Button prompts and food icons
For the button prompts, we decided on a “Web 2.0” style. Everything is a bit shiny and gradients are used liberally. The food icons are going to be used in the minigames, especially Grocery Guide. This minigame will use the food icons to show what aisle the customers need to be led to. The goal of these assets is to be distinct at a small size - it needs to be easy to see what the customer wants as soon as the icon appears above their head. The icons are based on products within the game, so you’ll see the 3D versions of these items pop up on shelves!
Tutorial screen mockup
Lately the team has been focusing on refinement for our game, and making sure everything feels polished. My contribution is working on menus and screens within the game, like this tutorial/loading screen! We needed a way to explain the rules of the minigames to players before they’re thrown in, so this screen serves as a quick overview of what the players need to do. Quick bullet points of the rules and a video explanation will make the onboarding process nice and quick so players can jump right into the action.
Thanks for reading and showing interest in our work! We hope that you’ll enjoy shopping at Happy Mart.