Since the time of the reveal, CD Projekt Red has been using color yellow to characterize the aesthetics of Cyberpunk 2077. From the announcement to the artwork, up to the messages in which the postponements were made official, yellow has always been present in the pre-release campaign and then also in-game in the rich urban composition of Night City.
Speaking at the Digital Dragons games conference, Cyberpunk 2077 ambient artist Michał Janiszewski raised this topic while answering the question: “Why is everything so yellow? “. The mere fact that this question exists gives a clear sign to the CD Projekt team that the intent to make this iconic color become fully successful.
Janiszewski has mentioned the glass bottle of Coca-Cola as a key piece in the history of industrial design: we can recognize it by its shape, design, character and color. CD Projekt aimed for something like this: “We were talking about Coca-Cola. The color yellow is more or less the same. It conveys information and is easy to remember.”.
It was also an attempt to make appear Cyberpunk different from pre-existing icons of its kind. Janiszewski made it clear that congeners of the likes of Blade Runner and Judge Dredd were the inspiration for Cyberpunk 2077, but the team worked from the start to stand out. The “cyberpunk mystery” has become part of this effort on the branding side: “The majority of people, when he thinks of cyberpunk, think of a red color, a little blue“Janiszewski said, “but we wanted to have something new, something fresh; that’s why we chose the color yellow. It’s new, it’s like the ‘Californian style'”.
The CD Projekt team then tried to transfer the importance of color also in-game: “You can see it [nella] lining of clothes. It is there. And also the districts – such as the city center, is the main color of this district. Yup, we definitely put it wherever we could. But first of all we created our identity as a color, and then we inserted it wherever possible “.
Recall that the first expansion of Cyberpunk 2077 will arrive during the next year. Meanwhile, fans already dream of the sequel made in Unreal Engine 5.
