Make power icons look nicer

[Yikes]

There are so many power icons in this game that just have really unappealing palette choices lmao

It's totally ridiculous, but my enjoyment of a powerset sometimes is improved or reduced depending on how nice the power icons look

I'm a color theory junkie, and also an absolute fanatic of CoH's UI design. I love the way it looks and feels to click on the icons and hear the associated sounds. It's just really satisfying UI design that I haven't really felt in other MMOs or even a lot of other games. The game just has really oddly satisfying buttons to press. So oddly it's valuable to me to have those buttons LOOK nice too

 

There are some sets with icons that look amazing, in fact I'll show some examples of sets that I love the look of;

Elec Armor / Elec Melee / Elec Assault / Elec Control (I really like the elec set colors sorry, I mean it's not my fault they knocked it out of the park with these)

Rad Emission

Time Manipulation

Ninjitsu

Storm Summoning

Pain Domination

Munitions Mastery

Widow/Fortunata Teamwork

Willpower

Dark Miasma / Dark Control / Dark Armor

 

These are master class sets in their palette choices for their icons. The colors used contrast each other nicely, and are pleasant/vibrant tones that convey the theme/effect of the set very nicely. This results in the buttons actually feeling more satisfying to press. It's a really small thing, but it makes a world of difference to the - feel - of the game in the same way nice sound effects can. IMO all sets should be held up to the standard of these

 

 

This is NOT  joke post, I take UI design really seriously, and I really like how CoH handles power icons so this IS important to me, I swear!

I think it would just be nice to alter the icon palettes for some sets to make them look nicer. Either changing the palette outright, or adjusting the tones of either the center element or background. Here's some examples of sets with colors I think are ugly or bland or not very well conveyed, and I'll give my input on how they can be improved

 

Earth assault. The background brown chosen is a really gross, almost puke color, and the yellow on top doesn't contrast as much as it could (in fact, they're the exact same hue which certainly contributes to how bland this set of icons look). It just looks like sewage, when it could consist of more appealing earth tones. I'd adjust the set to look a little more like this:

 

Poison also has next to no contrast in its icons. While the kinda gross shade of green is excusable here as it's a set based around toxicity and poison, it still needs a fair bit more contrast for visual appeal and harmony. I'd change it to something like this, with purple being another color often used to represent poison or toxin:

 

Kinetics is a set with really boring icon colors. For a set that's literally about energy and movement, the icons always struck me as feeling really medicinal and stiff. The colors could really be pumped up here to invoke some energy and life (all this goes as well for kin melee). Perhaps like this:

 

For some examples of already decent icon sets that I feel could easily be improved further:

Force Fields doesn't have a really bad set of icons at all, but I feel like they're a little bit bland and could use some cleaning up. For such a relatively blue set, the icons are very green, and the center element is almost yellow. I would adjust it to be more like a blue background and blue-green element like this:

 

Elec Blast is a set with fine enough icons, but I feel like the blue used is really not conveying the idea of "electricity" super well. I'd almost say that this blue background would be more befitting the energy blast set, and this set should be a little bit more unified with the other elec sets. At that, I'd change it to look like this:

 

The illusion Control set has alright icons, but I feel like for such an exotic control set with such a unique personality and function, the icons don't convey well enough how special it is. I would just pump more color into it overall, something like this:

 

these are just examples. there are plenty more sets that could have spiced up icons :v