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Thanks to @Nibellion and tonyh24613 from Gaf I've been alerted to articles based on the other BotW CEDEC talks - so how bout a new thread?
Next up is the talk, "The Aim of BotW's UI - Immersive, Impressionable UI".
Being that their aim for BotW was to reconsider Zelda conventions from the ground up, they discussed how they achieved their goal of
creating UI that is instantly recognizeable as a change, but seamlessly integrates with the game world in 4 categories -
graphics, font, design and animation. Their overall concept being - only essential UI. Graphics -
goal was to be understated so nothing would stand out in a negative way.
Coallescing information so there aren't as many places players would have to look. 
For the title menu they chose to make proper use of empty space instead of making the selections large.
To help unify the UI they adopted a color they called "Zelda White", which has a bit of yellow. Used in the package and logo as well!
Font - they prioritized borderless, simply colored text with zero frills. The overseas fonts were custom made, but for Japanese they used
"Logo G Black" for Katakana and "Raguran Punch" for Kanji - intending for the Japanese text to be both powerful and nostalgic,
italicising to make it easier to read. They applied this to the logo font for a cohesive feel.
ancient feel by adding more decoration.
They acknowledge that the lack of a tutorial was intentional to strengthen immersion, and only display minimal UI elements so players
wouldn't feel guided by the hand. They applied different animations to the UI in order to make things more noticeable after
One example - hearts light up white when you've taken damage. "Display simple UI and make it appear high quality."
They only had 2 UI designers who wouldn't be able to handle everything alone, so they worked with the programmers to implement little tricks
giving programmers control over them. Up until BotW designers needed programmers in order to implement data into the game, so with BotW it
120 sections that could be dynamically loaded, with 4 levels of zoom. This included distinguishing non-open areas with separate colors, so
textures would be generated for each section every night.Finally, they give examples of how they utilized their "screen capture" technology
Original thread here:
"Logo G Black" for Katakana and "Raguran Punch" for Kanji - intending for the Japanese text to be both powerful and nostalgic,
italicising to make it easier to read. They applied this to the logo font for a cohesive feel.
ancient feel by adding more decoration.
They acknowledge that the lack of a tutorial was intentional to strengthen immersion, and only display minimal UI elements so players
wouldn't feel guided by the hand. They applied different animations to the UI in order to make things more noticeable after
One example - hearts light up white when you've taken damage. "Display simple UI and make it appear high quality."
They only had 2 UI designers who wouldn't be able to handle everything alone, so they worked with the programmers to implement little tricks
giving programmers control over them. Up until BotW designers needed programmers in order to implement data into the game, so with BotW it
120 sections that could be dynamically loaded, with 4 levels of zoom. This included distinguishing non-open areas with separate colors, so
textures would be generated for each section every night.Finally, they give examples of how they utilized their "screen capture" technology
FYI - here's the link to the original Japanese article: game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1078…
Thread on sound design:
