Graphic Design in the Sonic Franchise

Sonic 3, Sonic Adventure and Sonic Generations are my top 3 games for the graphic design elements.

But I really think they had something going on with the Generations design that they could've kept expanding on. Lost World/Runners at least had that going on for them.

I also think their current direction is kind of boring. Not bad, just boring. With the mobile games being the biggest offenders.

But I just think they need to update their internal style guide. Even the merchandise packaging suffers from it.

The light blue/dark check pattern design is not it.

 

Forces' interface didn't have a tech-inspired interface, what? It was more like traces of old war propaganda posters, though I admit they could've done more with it.

 

S3&K, Adventure, and Generations have killer graphic design - there's a pop-art playfulness to them, similar to arts and crafts in a way? Like I took toy hole-punches and scissors and had my way with all the coloured paper haha. They're all tied together by context and history, something modern SegaSonic hasn't been able to keep up as of recent sadly.
Personally, I believe it best to keep Generations' particularly extravagant philosophy to their anniversary projects, if only to keep it special - the thing is, its extrapolated from a whole bunch of classic titles' methodologies, so as long as you take bits and pieces and evolve them further, then that should be fine. :3c (Rush & the Advance series is a fantastic derivative, if you wanted and example!)

Funnily enough, I gotta agree with Vervette; As much of a hot take as it may be, Sonic Forces had something going for it with the art! Taking inspiration from propaganda posters, making things rough and dirtied in contrast with the blockiness of everything you need to read, how switching between options has a flickering effect in reference to Infinite's abilities, blending text-boxes into the font... There's reason, feel to it. Even the IDW comics have done a good enough job at keeping up the practice with the occasional cover variant!

Not gonna lie, whatever they had going on with Sonic 06 and Riders is pretty fire, too! There's a crisp, Windows Vista inspired next-gen feel to them, with all the glassy/shiny UI, how nicely they segment every piece of needed information and lead the viewer's eye with every triangular shape they can mustre. Far superior to Frontiers' attempt at futurism imo, which is frustrating since, like, look at the results screen!!! There's something there, SEGA! It's heart-wrenching! ToT

 

As far as Frontiers goes, I'm guessing that the minimalist, tech-y UI is going after the look of menus in Assassin's Creed 2.



Because there's nothing that Sonic Team loves quite like being 15 years late to a trend.

 

I will always love to death how stylzed the menus and UI look in both Sonic CD (especifically the 2011 version for this one) and Sonic Adventure 2 - it' so eye-pleasing that makes me want stay in the menu longer.

Another thing I'm glad Sonic is actually consistent is it always have geeat logos; there's tons of varation and they look very inspiring.

 

Yeah, Generations is probably my favorite. It's a very versatile style while still being a perfect nod to the classic JP design elements.
I agree that it be great if they just kept it while infusing it with whatever tone or ideas they have for a project. Obviously, they brought it back for Shadow Generations but I think that's a nice example of that happening, even if it's mostly just some color swaps.

 

Honestly everything now lacks the style and appeal of the golden era and is hurting for it. Going back and playing S1-SK and those games were all so imaginative and gorgeous.

 

*perks up at the mention of graphic design*

I actually spent some time vectorizing the backgrounds for the JP box art of 1-3K & CD, and honestly, it has so much personality. It seems to be a spin on (perhaps a deconstruction of) Memphis Design (think stereotypical 80s and 90s graphics), which itself has roots in Art Deco, Bauhaus, and 60s Pop Art. Sonic 1 seems to play it straight with some slight Bauhaus, Sonic CD leans a bit more into Art Deco, Sonic 2 is harder to pin down but it's seemingly a minimalist pop art, and Sonic 3 seemingly puts it all back together and keeps things going into various Game Gear Games and Sonic Jam.


When they revisited this for Sonic Generations, they took the more modern take on Memphis Design, as you see when people search for 90s graphic art. In that I mean lots of use of cutout shapes, stars, circles, very much what you would see at a birthday party, which is fitting as there's a confetti quality to Memphis Design, especially as you see it with it's resurgence today. Sonic Mania then turns it on its head again by changing the background to a bright yellow, which you could argue was a trend for nostalgic products back in 2017, as you see something similar with Cuphead (I haven't quite got a handle on that one, but there's something there). Then you have a push back towards the popular usage of Memphis in Sonic Superstars as seen all over the menus and UI elements for that game while retaining that yellow motif.

I find it ironic that all of this was thrown out in the West for a more cartoon style to the box art which was all over children's products at the time. Japan had everything set up to appeal to the west and then SoA (and SoE to a lesser extent) threw it out thinking they knew better.

To draw parallels here, I've recent taken to playing the Bonk series on TurboGrafx-16 (and SNES). The Japanese box art for those games (called PC Genjin there which was a play off of the Japanese name for TB16 PC Engine) was all arts and crafts while the American Box art was again a cartoon style (though inconsistent).

Spoiler: Example

There's something about Japanese box art from that era, they always went in more artsy creative route with box art while America was still beholden to the sterilized corporate formula.

Now, I wouldn't say that the classic box art would work well for Modern Sonic. He's his own thing entirely and is naturally going to be influenced by modern trends as people have noted above. SxSG works because it's riffing off of Sonic Generations, but I don't think a Frontiers 2 or whatever comes next is going to work well with Memphis Design inspired marketing material. It's seen today as too 90s and there's been a concerted effort to make Sonic "cool" again. Like it or not, Memphis, while nostalgic, is not seen as "mainstream cool".

 

Probs a hot take here, but I absolutely love the graphic design of Sonic Forces with its constructivist leanings; very much sells the idea of 'revolution'. And yeah, I wish they'd have gone further with it also.

 

Heroes' graphic design is kind of like a more colourful take on SA2's but I always loved the little speech bubbles the enemies would make, made them feel so alive

Heroes and Riders are probably the closest a Sonic game has come to fully realizing the Y2K graffiti street art aesthetic that modern Sonic originally had.

(god I really hope SEGA team up with Production I.G. again some day)

One thing I like is that the series isn't afraid to shake up and refresh its UI design from game to game. The game that comes after Frontiers will probably bring its own graphic style with it and that'll be interesting to see.

 

Ah, that's the word for it. Yeah, I do like how well it blends in with the game's themes, though I would've liked it to gone a bit further too. I like that style.

 

Others have alluded to it but I think the Memphis Style Art is used in Gens, Mania and Superstars because those games feature Classic Sonic or take place in the 90s. Not just as nods.

I think Modern Sonic could use it if they really wanted to but the game would have to be more upbeat. It doesn’t necessarily have to remain a 90s thing imo. Frontiers clearly uses the high tech/computer look because of the Ancients and Cyberverse theme.

 

For all the talk about how Memphis Group influenced graphic design in classic Sonic, I think it's interesting to notice the ways in which it departed from these influences. Memphis thought is distinctly formal, as in, non-functional, non-representational and concerned with the form of things as a means of expression. But I guess you could say the emergence of digital interfaces and landscapes helped kill the aesthetic, exactly because people needed to actually know how to use these new devices. I suppose games weren't different. So while the JP box arts are full of shapes etc., the games themselves are surprisingly clean (Sonic 1 in particular).

Another interesting difference is that the use of basic shapes in the games' HUDs, title cards etc., while sometimes really reminiscent of Memphis design and art (I guess the most glaring example would be Sonic 2's title cards), is representational (or rather, symbolic), not formal. Take Sonic 1's title card:

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There's this potentially festive quality to using circles in the title card, but here it evokes Sonic himself instead of being a separate kind of expression. Compare with Sonic Mania's title cards, which don't (and aren't meant to) refer to anything at all (except, probably, through the colors of the columns alluding to Sonic, Tails and Knuckles). I would even argue that the OBSESSION with jagged surfaces everywhere in classic Sonic graphic design, even in the JP box arts, serves a similar purpose as it's reminiscent of Sonic's spikes besides evoking an edge by not making surfaces flat or round:

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In this regard, stars -- which you can see on Sonic's winged emblem and in many other instances -- are the perfect companion shape for Sonic because they're all pointy, but also round! And they have a few useful connotations. In the winged emblem, they help bring that military vibe; in the Sonic 1 8-bit ending, they're the bling and sparkle. In any case, they're never purely forms as they're always a proper symbol.

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While we're still here and have Sonic 1's title screen in mind, it's good to talk about this other departure that, I think, helps explain why the West mostly ditched that influence in its own box arts etc.: Memphis design is hopelessly, even if intentionally, flat. The vibrant flat colors, even for shape arrangements that would simulate light, make it hard to work with depth and I guess console games were increasingly anxious about looking 3D in the first half of the '90s. So while Sonic isn't obsessed with depth, it does make a point of using drop shadow everywhere, again even as a functional cue: shadows make things pop out from the standard "game screen", so that's what makes them "the HUD". You can see the focus on 3D elements became more prominent as the series progressed (and Sonic 3 & Knuckles goes crazy on highlights too). Crucially, you can see how Mania, by adding a heavy stroke around these HUD elements, instead makes them look like 2D stickers on the screen, circling it all back again (go back to those title cards and notice the biggest difference).

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Now I don't mean any of this as some kind of counterpoint like "oh actually Sonic doesn't take as much from Memphis design as you all think" because that wouldn't be true anyway. Sonic's graphic design oozes '90s aesthetics. But what doesn't come from that school, and the reasons for that, is just as interesting!

What you could argue about Sonic Blitz is that these same elements are present in some way or another, but there isn't a coherent language to them at all. For example: there are stars over there in that second picture you posted too, but what are they there for? What are they doing? They don't articulate anything purely visual, and they don't allude to anything. They're quite literally just there. You have a weird mishmash of elements that don't really communicate anything (what is that about those red color halftones alongside a blue screen with round edges and a luminous lattice over it? The number and the text have different fonts and styles? Come on). That's why it feels generic, I guess.

 

That's not something I had considered, but you're right. Even Jam does that.

Spoiler: Big Pic

Exactly! Which is why I would call the classic box art examples of deconstruction. Sonic 2 seems to have more of an Art Deco leaning, especially with the use of Gaslight font for title cards, whereas something like Jam you could argue has some Bauhaus leaning with the repetitive circles and other solids shapes (might be misreading a bit there though). I'd also say that the use of colors is quite different than what you'd typically see in Memphis, in that most Memphis favors pinks, purples, blues, some yellow thrown in usually in secondary hues, whereas Sonic favors bright primary colors. I'm very curious who was the box art designer for those games. In order to break rules or conventions like that and take inspiration from other styles that contributed to Memphis, they would have to have a very firm foundation in art/graphic design. I'd imagine it's someone who was based at SoJ since it's exclusively Japanese box art and they worked on Sonic CD with the rest of the trilogy. Do we know who that was?

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I'm quite curious about the use of stars as a symbol for Sonic as well. There is the American Pilot meta backstory for Sonic which kinda fell by the wayside, but also there was a lot of star symbology going on during the early stages of the game when it was Oshima-San's Twin Stars proposal.

Since the proposal listed the setting as in the realm of dreams, it's kinda a no-brainer that stars would feature prominently; however it's still retained in Sonic 1 since stars have a militaristic quality to them, especially within the US Air Force. I guess Oshima-san really likes stars lol.

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I'm not sure this was as much a factor in 1991, was it? By 1994 I can see it, since Donkey Kong Country caused the whole industry to scramble over pre-rendered graphics, but most companies, Sega included, didn't really seem to care before that.

I'd argue SoA was more concerned with Sonic being quickly identifiable with kids and as a child friendly character and thus went with a more traditional route with that box art. The Japanese box art was undeniably artsy, which perhaps turned off people at SoA?

As an aside, the European box art is interesting though since they initially went with the Japanese art for Sonic 1, then the American artwork for Sonic 2, then did their own thing for Sonic 3, which you could argue was a middle-of-the-road approach to it.

 

Sonic 3 has peak graphic design:

Spoiler

The Sonic series has always put a huge emphasis on getting the "feel" right, rather than leaning too much into the graphical side of things, which is the ideal approach when it comes to graphic design aimed at a young audience, imo. If you look hard enough, you'll always find something to nitpick, but thankfully, that's never been the point. If something feels right, it feels right.

Want some example?

The yellow strokes around the lettering in the logo for Sonic Adventure 2 have no business looking this crazy.

 

I believe they're spiky like that to contrast with the smooth "2".



The logo represents the good vs evil theme, as well as contrasts/opposites -- in fact when the final logo was revealed it was officially stated that "The blue and black expresses contrast, which is the central theme of Sonic Adventure 2".

Obviously the top half of the logo background represents Sonic and the hero side, the bottom half represents Shadow and the dark side. Extending that to the lettering, the "Sonic Adventure" words are blue like Sonic whereas the "2" is reddish like Shadow's stripes*, so they're opposites -- former looks rough, spiky and straight, latter is smooth and in italics. Yet conversely the logo borders to the right of the "2" are spikier than the borders to the left of "Sonic Adventure", once again emphasizing contrasts, and reflecting the yin and yang thing -- in the yin and yang symbol the white half has a black dot and vice versa, representing the presence of one opposite within the other.

And let's not forget how much the original SA2 logo resembled said symbol.


* The lettering in the final logo also has an extra meaning. The SONIC ADVENTURE words are dark blue and have sparkles/stars within, resembling the night sky and reflecting the space setting. The 2's "bold orange and yellow are reminiscent of the California sun" (their actual words) to go with the San Fran-inspired setting. Once again, opposites: night and day, space and land.

 

I know, it's just, it took me more than two decades to even notice they were jagged like that, and I wonder whether they were hand-drawn or if someone was just messing around with the settings. They look kinda... um... fucked up, for lack of a better word. It makes sense now though, in a symbolic way. Thanks!

Gotta love SA2.

 

I always took the jaggedness as a practical decision given that the logo was fully rendered in 3D for the title sequence on Dreamcast. Less polygons means it's less resource intensive.