©
Since its early days, CD Projekt Red has used a specific yellow color in everything from illustrations to ads. Eventually, it even became a warning sign for fans following several delay announcements used the color as a background.
Speaking at the Digital Dragons Polish gaming conference, Lead Cyberpunk Environment Artist Michał Janiszewski spoke regarding this fact, using a section of his talk to answer the question “Why is everything so yellow?” Basically, the fact that so many people can remember this shade proves that the team did their job right.
At the beginning of the speech, Janiszewski mentioned the Coca-Cola glass bottle as a key element in the history of industrial design – you can recognize it by its shape, design, font and color. CD Projekt was aiming for something like this: “We were talking regarding Coca-Cola,” Janiszewski said. “Yellow is almost the same. It conveys information and is easy to remember.”
However, it wasn’t just a case of creating a color (and accompanying design) that you would remember – it was also an attempt to make Cyberpunk feel different from existing icons in the genre. Janiszewski has made it clear that things like Blade Runner and Judge Dredd were the inspiration for Cyberpunk 2077, but the team has been working from the beginning to feel different from them, not to impress them.
“Yellow Cyberpunk” became part of these branding efforts:
“Most people, when they think of cyberpunk, they think of red, a bit of blue,” Yaniszewski said, “but we wanted to have something new, something fresh, so we chose yellow. It’s new, it’s like “California style”.
Fellow lead environment artist Katzper Nepokolczycki said there was “a very long conversation” regarding creating an iconic brand identity for the game. Although it was less common in the game itself, the team still aimed to introduce this yellow color in Night City:
You can see it in the lining of the clothes. She is there. And even districts – for example, in the center of the city, this yellow color is everywhere, this is the main color of this district. But basically it was, first of all, to figure out, I think, our identity as a color, and then we took it and implemented it everywhere we might.
For the art team, perhaps the best indication of how successful the “yellow cyberpunk” experiment was was that other companies started using it themselves:
“There were companies in Poland trying to use this color,” says Nepokolczycki. “I remember here, at bus stops and on mobile phones, food ads used color to grab your attention. They literally used color because they noticed how powerful it can be. Here in Poland, Cyberpunk was crazy at one point, posters are everywhere – and people just “stole” the color and used it for their own purposes.”
It probably won’t be the last we’ll see with this particular color. The game’s first expansion is expected to release in 2023, and we know the developer has plans for a cyberpunk franchise beyond that first game – “yellow cyberpunk” will almost certainly be back to help you learn regarding these projects.
