About Me

Hello everyone, my name is Erik Hanson and I am a recent graduate of California Lutheran University (May 2013). Going through college, I realized my passion for UI design and placed an emphasis on it while studying for my major of Computer Science in addition to getting a minor in Multimedia with a Graphic Design emphasis.

I have always been an avid gamer and designer, creating my first video game concept at the young age of 7. This passion to create games and characters persisted all the way through middle and high school, devoting large amounts of my free time to not only play games as a means of artistic and mechanical analysis, but to draw my own game characters, create game sprites, write stories, and outline game mechanics and inner workings. This desire to become a game designer threw me into a number of artistic and technical hobbies including programming and graphic design.

While most of my training for programming came from school work, graphic design was something that I  ventured on my own (being completely self taught in the workings of Adobe Photoshop after years of experimentation and research). I never really considered my work to be very good at first… but during my time as a highly active member of dissidiaforums.com, a forum devoted to higher level competitive play for the game “Dissidia: Final Fantasy,” my personal avatars and signature graphics got the attention of a number of members. Eventually I was asked by a tournament organizer to create some trophy signatures for the winners. Once they went public, an astounding number of members on the forums began to compliment my work and ask if I took graphics requests. After much thought I began my own personal graphics requests thread, where forum members quickly began to flood me with requests. It is at this point that, after working nonstop on personal requests, that my skills with photoshop and style began to improve drastically.

I later took a graphic design class during my senior year to gain a more in depth knowledge on the subject. While my time working on projects at dissidiaforums.com really helped me understand the fundamentals of graphic design, the class at CLU really helped me to expand my skills to things beyond just “artistic” works, and more into real world examples like logo design, advertising, and website design. More recently, I have focused more of my attention to UI and HUD design for games. I made this blog to share my best works and go into more detail about my past projects. Enjoy!