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SYNCRO

A main menu concept for a space game that doesn't exist, and the reason this whole site looks the way it does.

THE ORIGINAL

Syncro was a portfolio piece I made years ago, purely to show off UI design. There was no game behind it, no brief and no client, just a main menu for a space game that didn't exist, built to see how far I could push a look.

The original Syncro main menu concept, with an inverted galaxy background
The original Syncro main menu.

Looking at it now, it is far too busy and the centre of the image is also way too dark. It was a genuinely fun exercise though, and one idea in it turned out to be worth keeping.

THE INVERSION

The whole look comes from one single move: take a photograph of a blue galaxy on black, and invert it. Deep space becomes warm cream, blue dust becomes burnt orange, and the bright core, which is the part your eye goes to first, becomes a soft dark bloom.

The original blue galaxy photograph used as the source for the inversion
The source image, before inverting.

I did it in Affinity, and it was a one-click experiment that just happened to work. You end up with a palette that feels like aged paper and printed ink rather than a screen, while the underlying image is still unmistakably a galaxy. It reads as space and as print at the same time, which is quite a strange combination.

THIS SITE IS THE SAME TRICK, RUNNING LIVE.

The background here isn't a photograph, it's a particle galaxy rendered in real time with the inversion applied as a CSS filter on top. Which means it can be undone selectively: the headline bands and every content panel on this site invert a second time locally, exposing the true blue galaxy underneath. Same idea as the Syncro menu, except the source is live and the inversion is a layer rather than a baked-in edit. All while using a more minimalist and easy to read design.

BUILDING THIS SITE

The site you're reading was built with Claude Cowork over five days of ideation, iteration and an enormous number of changes.

Roughly half of that went into one single problem: making the galaxy actually look like a galaxy. Everything else, the layout, the type, the inverted panels, the character sheet, came together comparatively quickly. Not the galaxy.

THE PROBLEMA basic particle spiral looks like a pinwheel, not like a galaxy. Real ones have a dense bright bulge, arms that scatter and thin out as they trail, and a huge amount of faint dust in between the bright stars.
WHAT IT TOOKSeparate particle layers at different sizes and brightnesses, radial concentration tuned so the core packs without blowing out, arm scatter loosened so the spiral reads as drifts of stars rather than solid ribbons, and custom sprites with diffraction spikes so bright stars actually look like stars. It only stopped looking synthetic once the faint material outnumbered the bright material by a long way, which is quite the opposite of what feels right while you are building it.

UI concept, art direction and build by Ignacio Garcia Zea.