VISUAL LANGUAGE BRIEF · DRAFT 1
We are rebuilding a ten-year-old digital magazine as something that has never existed before. We have broadly defined the architectural structure. Visual design is entirely up for grabs.
For Ardhira Putra · from James Burns · Melbourne
SUPERJUMP is an independent video game magazine about games and gaming culture. Ten years old, 2,232 published pieces, 195 contributors around the world, two Australian IT Journalism Awards.
The site it lives on is a heavily modified default Ghost theme. It has never truly suited us. It behaves like a blog — a reverse-chronological list where everything expires after three weeks — and that is the opposite of what we actually are.
So we are rebuilding from scratch. This is not about a new coat of paint, it's about an entirely different concept.
This is not a style guide. It contains no colours, no typefaces we are committed to, and no artwork. It describes what SUPERJUMP is, shows you some very early thinking, and ends with what we would like you to define.
Worth being precise about this, because it determines how much room you have. The answer is: a great deal.
Who we are and what we publish. We have defined ten 'departments' (content categories) and what each one means. All of our existing 2,300+ pieces have been classified into this new system anticipating the upcoming build.
The visual language, obviously. But also the layout and interaction model itself. The tiles, the grid, the mosaic, the way the open world behaves — all of it is speculative. We built it to think with, not to specify. If you have a better idea of how a non-linear magazine should be navigated, we would much rather hear it than have you decorate our very early draft structure.
We are not games journalism. No review scores. No news. No pretence of objectivity.
An audio piece that puts a listener at a campfire in Hyrule is not reporting on a game. It is a new work that exists because that game exists. The same is true of a comic, a piece of fiction, or an essay that uses a game to think about grief.
The nearest relatives are Lost in Cult, the 33⅓ book series, and Criterion. None of these publications fit within the traditional games journalism mold.
There is the experience of playing a game. Then there is the pleasure of talking about it afterwards with people who also played it — which is where meaning gets made, and which almost nobody serves well.
Games media sells information and verdicts. We serve the conversation after the game.
We write about games that bring us joy. Criticism is welcome — but criticism is a form of attention, and nobody writes three thousand careful words about something they do not care about. We do not do teardowns and we do not do ragebait. We partner with game creators rather than reporting on them from a distance.
Some years ago we ran three idea workshops with the team, originally for a print project that never happened. Eighteen people across three sessions. Each session was run blind — nobody saw what the other groups had produced.
The same ideas kept surfacing independently: Navigation as a game interface, writing from inside the moment without hindsight, sound/audio as a primary channel, the audience choosing their own route through the experience.
The structure described below has emerged from these workshop ideas.
We threw away categories. There is no Reviews, no News, no Features. Instead there are ten departments, and every one describes a position, a way of telling, or a direction of attention — never a verdict.
Each carries an English name and a Japanese term. English carries the meaning; Japanese carries the texture. We publish in English, with a real debt to Japanese design — this is not decoration and it is a core element of our brand (our logo contains both EN and JP componentry).
Read down the first five and you will notice they are a sequence of how we know things: what we do not know yet, what we are finding out, what one person witnessed, what can be established — and then what is purely fictional (and clearly marked as such).
Every one of the 2,232 stories in our archive has been classified into exactly one of these departments. That work is done.
Not a chronological blog-like feed. Rather, a mosaic of tiles on a ten-column grid, scrolling vertically. Tile size carries importance. Every department has a presence, surrounded by six pieces drawn from that same department.
There is a shuffle control. Press it and the whole surface recomposes — tiles reorder and change size, so the same story might be small on one visit and large on the next.
Shown at desktop proportions, scaled to fit this page. Scroll inside the frame. Try the shuffle tile — the dark square with crossing arrows — then click any black department tile to go deeper. Open full size for the real thing.
Everything here is deliberately monochrome and deliberately plain. We stripped the colour out so that nobody — including us — would mistake it for a decision.
But we want to go further than that. The tile system itself is just our first attempt. Squares on a grid is one answer to "how do you navigate a non-linear magazine", and it is not necessarily the right one. It exists to prove the idea can hold together and to give you something concrete to react against. You are entirely free to propose something that has no tiles in it at all.
Click a department and it does not disappear. Everything around it sinks away, and that tile itself grows into the header of the page you are arriving at. Two different pages, one continuous movement — as though the environment rearranged around you rather than being replaced.
A department is a place, not a list. It shows what is new since you were last here, which series live here, and which writers work here most. Press BACK TO SUPERJUMP and watch the header fold back into its tile.
This is the part we are most excited about, the part least resolved, and the part where we think you could contribute the most.
The premise: an archive of 2,232 pieces cannot be browsed. A list is useless at that scale. So instead of browsing, you walk it. You arrive standing on a single story. Around you are the stories connected to it — and each one tells you why it is connected (also Roguelike. also Priya Sridhar. also 1994). Step onto one and the world re-centres around it. We track your trail/path through the world.
That is the core concept we are keen to build as the central navigational spine of the experience. However, it is absolutely the least developed idea so far. What you'll see below is an extremely rough illustration of the concept but it's nowhere near as interesting, fun, or delightful as it needs to be. The idea here is not just to find interesting and relevant content, but for the journey itself to feel delightful and engaging. Ideally, our visitors anticipate coming back to keep exploring!
Click any tile to step onto it. Drag the background to look around without moving. The connections are real, computed from ten years of actual tags, authors and dates.
This is the actual ask. We have deliberately not pre-answered any of it.
The biggest and least constrained piece of work here. We have a working mechanism and no world. What does a navigable space made from ten years of writing about games look and feel like? And how do we incorporate multiple forms of media over time? Including video, audio, and comic strips.
Treat our version as a proof that the underlying connections functionally work, and ignore everything else about it. Propose whatever you think this should be. It is the part of SUPERJUMP most likely to make someone tell a friend about us.
What SUPERJUMP's colours are, and — more interestingly — what colour means here. We have ten departments. Colour could identify them, or group them, or carry no meaning at all and simply be atmosphere.
Our instinct is that the interface should stay quiet and the artwork should carry the colour, like a gallery. But that is an instinct, not a decision. Note that all stories do already carry feature images/artwork. But we can utilise this as much or as little as desired through the interface.
Ten years of feature images chosen by 195 different people. Some are beautiful bespoke headers. Many are generic stock photography. Side by side in a grid they look like four different publications.
What is an image on SUPERJUMP? Does every story have one? Is there a system that makes an archive this inconsistent feel like one body of work? Maybe readers only see feature images when they click into a story and they see something else on the tiles or while navigating the 'open world'?
Ten departments need to be told apart instantly and remembered between visits. We have established that colour alone cannot do this — partly for accessibility, partly because ten is beyond what anyone can distinguish by hue.
Marks? Illustration? Pattern? Type treatment? Something per department that lives on a tile, a page header, a badge, and a favicon?
This matters as much as the stills, and it is why we approached you rather than an illustrator alone. The site is kinetic: tiles assemble on arrival, the surface recomposes on shuffle, departments grow out of their own tiles, the world re-centres as you walk.
All of that currently uses generic easing curves written by nobody in particular. How should SUPERJUMP move? What is the character of its timing, its weight, its arrivals and departures?
We navigate by square tiles on a grid. It works, it is responsive, and it is probably not the most interesting answer available.
If you think a non-linear magazine should be entered and moved through some other way entirely, we want that conversation. The structure underneath — departments, series, adventures, the connections between pieces — would survive almost any front end you can imagine.
We have avoided a skeuomorphic approach (flipping through literal magazine pages), but beyond that, we're open to absolutely any idea no matter how far out.
There are certain things we'll want to specifically highlight/call out for visitors. Here are just a few examples:
- A weekly Cover Story.
- Audio pieces (human-narrated pieces with 3D soundscapes).
- "Adventures" (curated routes through the archive based on certain emotions, themes, topics, etc... - this complements the freeform 'open world' idea and provides some guided structures that visitors can follow if they simply want to be served something cool and curated rather than explore on their own).
These deserve treatments of their own rather than being the same tile at a larger size.
Short list, and everything not on it is open.
These come from Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, which we have adopted as our standard. They are floors, not aesthetics. Everything above them is yours.
Where this stands. The editorial structure is finished and the archive is classified — that part is solid. Everything downstream of it is early and speculative, including the layout you have been clicking through. We have deliberately not committed to anything visual or spatial, and nothing in this document is so fixed that a better idea could not move it.
What we are not asking for. We are not asking you to build the site. Engineers will do that, from a separate technical specification. We are asking you to decide what it looks like and how it moves.
Scope, timing and budget are open for discussion — tell us what the work should be and we will shape the engagement around it.
James Burns · Founder & Editor in Chief · SUPERJUMP
superjumpmagazine.com
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