Test-chamber signage: the pictogram panel and the excursion funnel

Portal 2 · HUD & Gameplay UI

About this game

Developer: Valve · Publisher: Valve · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Realistic 3D · Screen type: HUD & Gameplay UI

What to study

Portal 2 teaches without a HUD because the chamber itself is the interface. The wall panel at centre-right is a complete instruction set in pictures: a turret pictogram warns what is in the room, a falling figure with a down arrow and an X tile mark the hazard and the forbidden move, and the large running man in a circle marks the exit, all of it framed by the dotted teal outline that Aperture uses to say 'this is a sign, read it'. The dotted lines are wiring made visible: they run out of the panel along the wall to the elements the panel describes, so cause and effect can be traced with the eye. The blue helix of the excursion funnel rises straight past the sign, the puzzle's moving part crossing its own documentation. Against all that environmental information, the actual HUD is two small arcs at the centre of the screen, the portal crosshair, and nothing else: no health, no ammo, no objective text. Frame at about 0:51 in the E3 Demo (Excursion Funnels) video (Steam), manually extracted at 51.0s: the pipeline's scene-change pass emitted zero frames for this continuous first-person take. Caveat: the E3 video's faint APERTURE LABORATORIES watermark sits in the top-left corner; it covers no part of the panel.

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

minimal-hud location-label

Components

Parts on screen.

Signage Crosshair

Screen inventory

wall signage panel framed by a dotted teal outline
turret pictogram tile at the panel's head
falling-figure and down-arrow tile beside a blue X tile
large running-man exit pictogram in a circle
dotted indicator lines running into and out of the panel along the wall
blue excursion-funnel helix rising past the panel
two pedestal platforms below the panel
portal gun with orange lamp at lower right
two-arc portal crosshair at centre frame, the entire HUD

Top 3 colors

#272c2a 29%#1a1d1b 22%#56574f 18%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Valve, Portal 2 screenshot: E3 Demo (Excursion Funnels), Perpetual Testing Initiative, Co-op Trailer and E3 Demo (Wheatley) videos (Steam), shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Valve.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-20. verified 2026-10-20: frame manually extracted at 51.0s from the pipeline-downloaded E3 Demo (Excursion Funnels) video (Steam) and inspected visually at full resolution (940x528, the Steam encode's native size); genuine in-game signage panel confirmed settled and legible (turret tile, falling-figure/arrow tile, X tile, running-man exit pictogram, dotted indicator lines, funnel helix, portal crosshair); the video's burned-in APERTURE watermark is confined to the top-left corner

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-20); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.