Inkwell HUD Frames

Inkwell HUD Frames is a set of 10 heads-up display frames drawn in the cel-shaded style, where a thick ink outline wraps two flat tones split by a hard diagonal terminator. It contains a minimap frame with a north marker, a character portrait frame, a compass strip, three crosshair reticles, an objective waypoint marker and a quest tracker plate.

These are the pieces that stay on screen the whole time a game is being played, which makes them the hardest to get right: every one of them has to be readable over arbitrary game art without covering the middle of the screen.

The shadow is a single hard-edged shape with no falloff — the defining property of cel shading, and the thing a gradient can never imitate. The outline uses the darkest tone in the palette rather than the border tone, or it reads as a thick grey frame instead of ink.

Inside that style this is the Inkwell reading of it: a light interface on a flat poster palette with signal red accents, built around a single bordered frame, square-cornered buttons at 152x52, banded bars divided into 5 segments, and solid icons on a 24px grid. Those measurements are why two families can share an art style without being interchangeable: the style decides how an edge is drawn, the numbers decide what the interface is for.

The quest plate marks a completed objective with a filled box and a struck-through line rather than by dimming it, so the tracker stays legible against a bright sky. The compass ticks alternate major and minor so a heading can be read at a glance rather than counted.

Every sprite ships as an editable SVG and as transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x, so you can drop the PNGs straight into an engine or open the vector and change a colour. Built to the same measurements as the rest of the Inkwell family, which means this kit and the Inkwell panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for cel-shaded and toon-rendered games.

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