Designers & Dragons Masthead Redesign and Icon Design [Logo Process | Case Study]

Evil Hat Productions just announced that they'll be re-publishing Designers & Dragons, Shannon Appelcline's epic history of the role-playing game industry and community. They're going to expand the book into four volumes, each volume focusing on the events of on decade from the 70s through the 00s. Fred Hicks asked me to revise the masthead and create a system of icons representative of each decade of gaming.


MASTHEAD

This one was tough because we didn't want to stray too far into WotC's official branding and we needed to communicate "designers" as much as "dragons." The usual solution would have been to make each word a different font, as the original title had done. I explored that solution at first, just to get it out of my system, but as you can see from the design process below, we eventually landed on a more refined typographic solution. The slides below are actual pages from the design docs I sent to Fred.

Round 1

"Essentially the same idea as the original Designers & Dragons masthead, but much more refined. This update pairs the very contemporary Gotham with classic D&D font Fritz Quadrata. The ampersand fuses with the second D to become a smaller mark.

Or maybe you want to go full Fritz Quadrata...

...or all Gotham.

Perhaps something a little more formal and unified, if a little prudish. Trajan being a very stalwart “title font” for damn near everything, but particularly apropos on a history book.

Jenson has a slightly more aged, humanist feel.

Maybe we can try a very high-design approach here, pairing Bodoni and Carton, with a Bodoni italic ampersand lying firmly outside the rectangle. The organic curves of that ampersand make it a natural place for a light touch of the draconica, without going full-on TSR with it."


Round 2

"Continuing with the exploration of various Bodoni styles for “Designers” and arranging the various elements. Also using Diavlo for  “Dragons”

Maybe lowercase? It seems a little too busy and the swoops compete with Diavlo.

Two-tone to distinguish each half of the title?

Or go all the same? Probably room for a middle-ground. Also not sure if the Bodoni Italic is holding up well in this phase. Might need to choose another font.

Maybe make the whole thing Diavlo? The lowercase g’s would be right on top of each other, so I converted an uppercase G to be small caps. Hopefully it’s not too noticeable.

That’s definitely holding up better than Bodoni. What do you think?"


Round 3

"This time around, we’re equalizing the priority of “Designers” and “Dragons.” As noted in the last round, these are odd words to stack at equal weight because of the matching descenders in the g’s. Moving the ampersand down to the second line might help nudge the words off-center so they’re less crowded.

For the sake of curiosity, let’s try the title using the same typeface as the original ampersand font: Bodoni Bold Italic (&). Very classy and respectable. If we go this direction, I would recommend not adding a bunch of superfluous textures. A white title on a cover could be a slightly more professional direction.

For example...

Thoughts?"

Well, Fred liked it! So we proceeded to the icon design.


ICONS
Each volume focuses on a different decade of gaming, each with distinctive events that changed the nature of the industry. The 70s were the origin of RPGs as we know them, led by the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons. The 80s were the industry's adolescence and Cyberpunk was the flavor du jour. The 90s saw the rise of Vampire: The Masquerade and Magic: The Gathering, we decided to focus on Vampire. And in the 00s, the d20 license encouraged dozens of small studios to release their own products.

Round 4

"We’re going with this as the masthead, so let’s look at some icon options. These will be used in full-color online and on marketing materials. Smaller black-and-white dingbats will be used in in-line text. I focused on one icon for each decade – 70s: Sword, 80s: Chip, 90s: Ankh, 00s: d20.

The “fancy: icon suite in black-and-white: The icons remain flat, but have a few touches to suggest dimension. The type is subtle, but clear. The background arrows flow into each other, capped at the beginning and end with flat sides.

 Color versions of the “fancy” icon. Tried to keep them generally monochromatic, but keeping the same shade qualities throughout.

The smaller dingbat versions of the icons in color and black and white. The interior details of each icon have been removed, along with the banners and text. The spokes of the circuit had to be slightly extended so they were clearly visible. The d20 doesn’t hold up as well in this treatment, ending up looking either like a hex or a cube (which are still related to gaming, but not specifically to this decade).

Cover and Spine Mockups."



Round 5

The changes from here on were mostly cosmetic, hence the repeated captions.

Round 6

Adding a handful of circular dingbats to the suite.

And you can see the final results at the top of this post! Hope you dig them. You can find out more about the books and follow their development at the Designers & Dragons product page!

Board Raptor Games Logo Design

Jenn Rodgers, J.R. Blackwell and the rest of the Velociraptor! Cannibalism! team have a name: Board Raptor Games. Yay! Buuuuut they needed a logo!

They were nice enough to ask me to do the honors. Hard to tell from this is early sketch, but I had a clear outline of where to take the logo. I was taking a little inspiration from the Philosoraptor meme for posing, but I didn't want to resemble on that image too closely. I thought, "Hm. What if he was holding a headless meeple? What if he had a board on his head?"

Neither of those really worked as well as the raptor's distinctive silhouette standing on its own. But surely this guy needed *some* kind of clear mark that called to his origins. Then I looked back at the original V!C! Kickstarter. Lo and behold, the solution. A velociraptor with a monocle. Of course! "Board member" or "Chairman of the board." Spiffy.

With that, it was a super-easy project. Most of the work was done in one weekend thanks to a very responsive client. Thanks, Board Raptor! Hope you like your logo!

» More about Velociraptor! Cannibalism! 

Century Club Logo Pins and Dice Bags!

Wow, check out the promotional items Evil Hat has coming up soon. These two beauties bear the Century Club logo from not so long ago! Follow Fred for new info.

The Century Club's Official Seal [Logo Design]

As a part of the upcoming Race to Adventure board game, Evil Hat wanted an official seal for the protagonists in the game. The Century Club is an international organization of daring and uniquely talented heroes in the mid-1920s.

We took inspiration from lots of the art deco forms of the era, especially the "wings" motif commonly seen in everything from hood ornaments to angel sculptures. It's fortunate that I work in the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, NC. We're surrounded by renovated tobacco factory architecture, including plenty of exposed steel infrastructure. Plenty of inspirational material there.

So we went thought a few iterations, some focused on Metropolis-style faces, surrounded by gear halos. Some focused on the idea of a Roman shield, tying back to a legacy of ancient heroism.

After a few rounds, we settled on the seal you see above. It combines the optimism of the pulp era and a faith in technology. We thought this could be something easily found on a broach, lapel pin, hanging on a wall or just worn on a t-shirt. This logo is Trademark Evil Hat Productions, LLC.

Tips for Customizing Hand-Drawn Fonts in a Logo, Title or Masthead

I wanted to use a nice cartoony font for the masthead of Pop and Locke's Last Heist. Blambot is always a great source for very well-done fonts in a variety of comic book styles. Nate Piekos has been in the business a long time and it's hard to beat the price for his fonts.

I used 12 Ton Goldfish. It looks great, but there is a common problem with hand-drawn fonts. When you have repeating letters, like the Ps and Os, you can tell they're identical to each other. It's an immediate tip-off that you just used a font without any additional revising to make it work for your purposes.

So, I customized the font in a few ways and I thought I'd share these tips. Follow these in order as you customize a font for your logo, title or masthead. But first, before you even try doing any of this I have one tip. Write the letters yourself! Grab a marker, try a few different tips, write them big, small, on paper, cardboard, etc. See if you can't draw the letters and get them just as you want before downloading a font. If you don't want to go through the trouble, then let's get to the fonts.

You're voiding the warranty.
Before you go tweaking any fonts on your own, a note of caution about the classics – Your Helveticas, Garamonds, and so on. Those are more than just fonts, they're freaking typefaces, drawn to exacting specifications for very particular purposes by master typographers. Adjust those at your own risk. You're better off adjusting fonts that are already hand-drawn. Their organic personalities will much better tolerate your tweaks.

Move the letters around.
Before you try editing the actual letterforms, try moving each one independently of the others. Move them closer or farther from each other. Move them up and down. Change the rhythm and beat and flow of the letterforms to your taste. In my case, I straightened out the letters in my masthead a bit so they followed the same baseline.

Adjust the thicks and thins.
Look at the vertical strokes of each letterform and try widening them or narrowing them. When you do so, make sure the strokes still maintain a relatively consistent width from end-to-end. If the width does change, make sure it does so gradually, without the harsh perfect angles indicative of a computer font. In my case, I made the vertical strokes of the Ps wider than the rest of the letterform. I also moved the counterspace of the Os a little to the top-right so the lower-left stroke is a little thicker.

Rotate, resize, but keep proportions in mind.
If you still want to to customize the font, try rotating an individual letter a few degrees clockwise or counterclockwise. I definitely recommend this for repeating letters in hand-drawn fonts where slight deviations make the whole graphic feel much more authentic. In my case, I rotated the Os and Ps. I also resized the "AND" so it wouldn't be as prominent as the two names. I made "AND" shorter, but kept the horizontal strokes didn't get thinner in the process.

Finally, change the actual shapes.
Once you've done all these edits, you may still want to make some edits to get things juuuuust right. In my case, I noticed these really sharp angles in the A and N in "AND" that just did not fit the flat terminals in the rest of the letterforms. So I cut off those angles to make them flat.

And that's it! In the image at the top of this post, you can see how the original plain font looks compared to the customized version. Doing these little tweaks helps make your logos and titles stand apart from the pack. Just remember, these are tweaks. If you go around stretching fonts willy-nilly, don't tell anyone you were following my advice. ;)