ELDORIA

ELDORIA is a fantasy RPG identity. The emblem is an upright broadsword standing on the centre line with two angular wings folding in behind it, so the whole thing reads as a crest from a distance and as a weapon up close.

The blade is the darkest thing in the mark and the wings are the lightest, which is the wrong way round from how most fantasy crests are built. Doing it that way makes the sword the figure and the crest the ground, so at any size the first thing you read is the weapon.

There's one repeated shape holding it together: a diamond with a smaller diamond cut out of it. It appears at the pommel, again at the centre of the crossguard, and a third time as the fuller running down the blade. Three instances of the same motif spaced evenly along the vertical axis, which is what gives the emblem its rhythm without adding any new detail.

The wordmark is set in PF Monumenta Pro, letterspaced wide and sitting well below the emblem rather than tucked under it. The typeface has sharp wedge serifs and a high thick-to-thin contrast that echo the blade tip and the points on the wings, so I didn't need to draw custom letterforms to make the two halves agree.

The challenge

Fantasy logos drown in detail. Filigree, dragons, bevels, gradients, an outer glow to hold it all together, and at 32 pixels in a store listing the whole thing collapses into a smudge. That was the thing to design against.

So the mark is one weapon, two flat colours, no gradients, no strokes and no effects. Every edge is straight or a simple curve, the negative space between the blade and the wings is wide enough to survive being scaled down, and the silhouette is perfectly symmetrical so nothing looks accidental when it's small.

The palette is a soft antique gold, #BC9151, against a deep navy, #1A2B3B. Two colours only, both mid-toned rather than saturated, so the mark sits over key art without either shouting at it or disappearing into it.