UI assets - formats, file types?
In an effort to expand on my services I can offer as a freelance artist, I have been looking at providing UI art. I'm not doing any animations or UX just providing buttons, borders icons et. Are there any specific file formats I need to work in? Any hidden secrets I may need to know?
Comments
Otherwise, I'd just suggest that you know what resolution screen you're designing for, so that you're working at native resolution and keeping things looking super sharp. It'd also be worth bearing in mind what the native resolution actually looks like in real-world units. Some things that look fine on your 72 pixels/inch monitor become almost invisible when you shift toward the ~400 pixels/inch of many of the newer mobile devices. It's especially worth remembering because with mobile devices, you're often using "touch" controls, so buttons should be large enough that you can tap them unambiguously. (I believe Apple's got a UI guide for this, with a minimum recommended size for buttons, though I forget what that was.)
I'm not that clued up about UI, but my understanding is that, aside from the actual design of the flow, layout and usability of a UI, it's actually the implementation that makes UI artists particularly in-demand. So, in that sense, it might be worth checking out how the UE4 and Unity5 UI systems work. (I believe they've both reached the point where they're effectively drag-and-drop, and can be animated in the game engines themselves, so you don't even have to know much coding any more, unless you're doing something especially non-standard.)