The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

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Turuk
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by Turuk »

Better with the blockier font, but something about it almost makes it appear blurry to my eyes. Those are interesting fonts though, are any of the letters from Roman Rustic?

As to the bumpiness, my eyes can tell that there's a difference between the two, but I cannot really readily discern what it is (if you had not told me, and even then...) so I would just pick the one on the bottom for the slightly darker color.
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

The fuzziness is probably because of too much gaussian on the drop shadow, plus the thin parts having very little contrast (this is caused by the filter algorithm using gaussian blur to create the 3-d shape for the letters, and this doesn't work equally well on parts of different scale).

The blocky version was "artificial uncial," I haven't started to mix anything yet.

The bumpiness effect is supposed to remove the excessive smoothness of the filter, so that it woudn't clash too much with the worn and batterd look of the shield in larger sizes. The problem is that because of the small surface area of the text, stronger texturising than that will easily make it look look messy.
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by kitty »

What's your intention behind changing the font? What exactly do you believe is wrong about the current one? I don't want to say that the current one is perfect - but i think you'll need some rationale behind your changing efforts. Ask yourself what exactly do you want to achieve. Just trying another one for the sake of trying will be for vain. If you know what you are trying to "say" with your font it will be much easier to find a fitting one.

But regardless which font you'll use - please do some kerning and spacing, the current distances are hideous.
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

I'm not going to change the font on my own. I thought that since the logo is being renewed, it would be good idea to open discussion about whether the font needs updating too. Personally, I don't think the old font is terrible, just sort of New Age-y, it doesn't really contain any real medieval design elements. On techical side, if the logo will be localised, it would be nice if the font included most of accents for latin-based European languages, plus preferably also version for cyrillic and greek letters. The current font doesn't contain any of this, and strictly speaking, its licence doesn't allow modifications.

As for what the font is supposed to "say", I guess someting along the lines of: "Battle of Wesnoth is a strategy game set in a medieval-like fantasy world, featuring clashing armies of knights, swordsmen, elves and orcs and other otherwordly creatures." I've spent few hours of going through free font pages, browsing sections like "medieval," "gothic," "fantasy," "celtic," "script" etc., but nothing has jumped up and said hello. The fonts on the page I linked to have so had most potential in my eyes.

As for kerning and such, the originals are in Metafont, and I just made a quick conversion, I'm not even sure I got the metric data right (metafont is quite complex system).

Meanwhile, I have finished the basic design of sword hilts (some rust, grime and other signs of wear still pending) and started shading the metal rim of the shield:
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by kitty »

As for what the font is supposed to "say", I guess someting along the lines of: "Battle of Wesnoth is a strategy game set in a medieval-like fantasy world, featuring clashing armies of knights, swordsmen, elves and orcs and other otherwordly creatures."
You won't ever be able to say half as much with a font choice. Think easier, just get together a series of adjectives and you'll have more luck. A font can be strong and bold or elegant and classical or whimsical or thelike. It can tell you about the character of the content but not about the content itself.
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by Rocket Slug »

I agree with Kitty in that the typeface can speak loads and seriously affect first impressions. This one just doesn't feel as serious. There's a Comic Sans feel to it, and it loses a lot of the elegance the previous iteration had.
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by ink »

Personally, I think the font choices until now look too weak. This is a war/adventure type game. The fonts I've seen until now don't really talk to me. I Love the shield though. Especially the version with the bolts and the insignia I saw earlier in this thread.
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by Simons Mith »

I assume the ultimate plan is to make this version of the Wesnoth logo 'experienced'. But in that case it makes little sense to have a real gold trim combined with such distressed wood; is the metal going to be made more 'brassy'?
 
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

kitty wrote:You won't ever be able to say half as much with a font choice. Think easier, just get together a series of adjectives and you'll have more luck. A font can be strong and bold or elegant and classical or whimsical or thelike.
Your approach is reductive and formulaic. The fonts themselves are nothing but shapes, what counts is the associations they trigger in viewer's mind. These are very difficult to predict (especially with a multicultural audience), and the only way to know for sure is to throw something out there and see how it sinks in.

Fonts, or any symbols, can really "say" quite a lot when the connotation they invoke start cascades of cultural connections. Whether I can say something complex with them is another matter, because for that, I must first know how the audience is "primed" for certain symbolism. For example, my approach with more "authentic" typefaces may be failing not because there is anything wrong with them, but because the audience hasn't been exposed to them enough and not in the right contexts. Similarily, a blackletter font would be quite good choice thematically, but it wouldn't work because the audience has already been overexposed to it by the heavy metal and goth subcultures.
Simons Mith wrote:But in that case it makes little sense to have a real gold trim combined with such distressed wood; is the metal going to be made more 'brassy'?
It's certainly going to be brass. Polished brass looks quite a lot like gold. The rim should look more worn, though, and in time brass gets darker and duller, unlike gold. I've yet to figure out a good way to achieve that in a subtle enough manner, generally you can turn polished metal dull by blurring, but then it also easily starts to look more like plastic.
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by JW »

This looks pretty cool....butis it going to end up looking any different than the current logo?
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by thespaceinvader »

Hopefully, it'll look pretty similar. The idea, as I understand it, was to create a working, high quality, scalable vectored version of the current logo and Sceptre of Fire heraldry, not to create something radically different from the current model.
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

Yep, pretty much. It should look similar to the old one in small size, but contain enough detail that it's usable in much larger sizes as well (t-shirts, posters etc.).
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by kitty »

You won't ever be able to say half as much with a font choice. Think easier, just get together a series of adjectives and you'll have more luck. A font can be strong and bold or elegant and classical or whimsical or thelike.
Your approach is reductive and formulaic. The fonts themselves are nothing but shapes, what counts is the associations they trigger in viewer's mind. These are very difficult to predict (especially with a multicultural audience), and the only way to know for sure is to throw something out there and see how it sinks in.
Fonts, or any symbols, can really "say" quite a lot when the connotation they invoke start cascades of cultural connections. Whether I can say something complex with them is another matter, because for that, I must first know how the audience is "primed" for certain symbolism.
I don't see the contradiction here. You said you were trying to say "Battle of Wesnoth is a strategy game set in a medieval-like fantasy world, featuring clashing armies of knights, swordsmen, elves and orcs and other otherwordly creatures" with your font choice and I told you that i don't belive that this is possible. I don't think you can convey whole sentences just by choosing a specific font but that you can only trigger certain associations, emotions and thelike - that's why i suggest searching for adjectives you want to convey. Narrowing down on what I basically want to say helps me more to choose a font than writing an essay about it generally.

Apart from that the metal parts of the shield are really starting to look great! :)
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by Gauteamus »

One thing (of the nitpicky sort) that has been bothering me with the shield:
The mark(s) from branches in the wood does a great job as wood identifiers, but you would never make a shield with planks with such weakening flaws - at least not a decorational royal shield like this. I am abit embarassed to mention this silly piece of nothing, otherwise both the wooden, brassen and swordy parts looks absolutely great!
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Re: The new Wesnoth logo and the Loyalist sigil

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

In my experience, the knots make longer planks weaker against bending, but not against splitting. At least when splitting wood with an axe, I've noticed that stubs with knots in them are like, 5-10 times harder to split.

At any rate, there is always room for compromise between realism and looking good. I am going to refine the wood pattern later anyway, maybe I'll change it into radial pattern without an actual knot in it.
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