SiXiTS was commissioned by Ubisoft and National Geographic to create a mobile application that would teach users about the importance of protecting their environment. The Farmville-style social game was playable as a mobile app and encouraged users to recruit other players. Community expansion and the purchasing of virtual goods drove revenue while allowing users to give 10% of their proceeds to a charity of their choosing.

As the UI Designer on the NatGeo team, I was tasked with creating UI and dozens of in-game badges and props. I created the badges and props on a sprite sheet. NatGeo was a 3D game that, like all SiXiTS products, my illustrative style applied to the interface.

Each icon, badge, and UI element that I created for NatGeo was like a fully-realized miniature vignette illustration. I put a great deal of care into these images, creating them as vectors in Adobe Illustrator, and testing them at various sizes to make sure that they could read at all scales. At the time, I thought it was a good idea to use Papyrus as the font family– I figured if James Camerons box office hit, Avatar could do it, so could I! Papyrus felt like it belonged on a safari, and with the right color combinations, I think it was an appropriate choice for the apps decorative font family.

Unfortunately, funding for NatGeo dried up and the team stopped production. SiXiTS had wanted me to come back to work on another app, but I declined the offer to explore a contract with HRDAG. At the time I wanted to explore the trending flat design and move out of games to work on more branding and UI design.