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Influences and sources
The checks every page passes, the voice it speaks in, and where it all comes from.
Influences and sources#
Where the ideas came from. WoW Forever’s own art sets the palette; the rest shapes how it behaves.
WoW Forever’s own branding
- Carve a New Path with World of Warcraft: Forever (opens in a new tab)Blizzard News. The compass rose, the teal disc, the parchment.
- What’s Next panel recap and roadmap (opens in a new tab)Blizzard News. Teal banners on sand; dusk-rose skies.
- Collector’s Edition pre-purchase (opens in a new tab)Blizzard News. The parchment map and embossed leather.
- The Forever logo, by Ben Thompson (opens in a new tab)ArtStation. Trajan capitals; bronze around light.
- The Forever beta is live (opens in a new tab)Blizzard News. The build every record here is read from.
Influences
- Portolan charts and the rhumb-line network (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia · Library of Congress. Thirty-two bearings from each compass rose, principal winds in black, the rest in colour: our rhumb lines and the route.
- Material 3 Expressive: motion physics and shape (opens in a new tab)Google. Springs instead of curves, an expressive and a standard scheme: our snappy, bouncy and gentle springs.
- Meet Liquid Glass (opens in a new tab)Apple, WWDC25. Glass for controls over content, text on solid layers, and a solid fallback when transparency is reduced.
- Nested tooltips in Baldur’s Gate 3 (opens in a new tab)Larian · design discussion. Lock a tooltip to explore the terms inside it: our Shift-to-pin item tooltips.
- Messenger, Awwwards Site of the Year 2025 (opens in a new tab)Abeto. A small living world where the journey is the content.
- World of Warcraft: Forever beta interface (opens in a new tab)Blizzard forums. A classic layout with modern comforts, and a radial menu for controllers.
Techniques
- CSS anchor positioning (opens in a new tab)MDN · Baseline, January 2026. Tooltips, menus and popovers placed and flipped by CSS.
- light-dark() (opens in a new tab)MDN. Every role declared once for both themes; any subtree can switch scheme.
- corner-shape (opens in a new tab)MDN · Chromium 139+. Notched corners on game objects, round everywhere else.
- Scroll-driven animations (opens in a new tab)MDN. Vista layers drift apart as they pass; added only where supported.
- View transitions in Next.js (opens in a new tab)Next.js. The theme reveal now; icons and portraits morphing across pages next.
- Relighting images with depth maps (opens in a new tab)Codrops, August 2026. Light that follows the pointer across painted depth.
- GSAP 3.15: Flip, DrawSVG, MotionPath (opens in a new tab)GSAP. The route and the storyboard. All plugins are free.
- How we redesigned the Linear UI (opens in a new tab)Linear. Density and hierarchy for the everyday workspace.
A fan-made design system for a fan-made site. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment. Game art is loaded by FileDataID from WarcraftDB and never stored here; the painted scenes, vistas and the Waypoint mark are drawn in code. The previous guide is kept at /style-guide/forged.