Second round of logo drafts, up to four, borrowing how series RPG logos are put together

After the first round in 182, I gathered a bunch of Tales of series logos and tried again. I wasn't trying to copy the name, just how the logos are put together.

The title ARVELIA is for the whole series, and the subtitle EMBERS OF THE AZURE FLAME is for this game. If it becomes a series, I'd only swap out the subtitle, so another goal this time was keeping the subtitle as its own separable piece. While drawing, I realized cute shapes like rounded fonts, thick white outlines and candy-like fills just didn't work, and I also decided to drop the flame-blob emblem.

What I built

Draft 1 is brushstroke flames. Goudy Old Style Bold with the first A enlarged. Thin, blade-like flames sweep up and to the right from behind the letters on the right, and two small flame tongues sit behind the A on the left.

Draft 2 is embers. Arvelia in mixed case, set in Book Antiqua Bold Italic. There's no flame shape at all, just blue embers rising from the top of the letters and thinning out as they go up, plus thin glowing brushstrokes.

Draft 3 is a greatsword emblem. Perpetua Titling MT Bold with wide letter spacing. Karin's greatsword (dark blue steel, blue jewel guard) stands upright, with blue flames (Azure Flame Flash) and embers wrapped around the blade's edge.

The title text is stacked in the same order in all three: a silver metal fill, a 5px black ink line, a 9px silver-blue rim, a 15px outer black band, and finally a blue glow. The subtitle lives in its own layer group called "Subtitle (swap per game)" (Perpetua Titling 84px, letter spacing 26).

Draft 4 is one extra I tried. This time I looked at the Final Fantasy X, X-2 and IV logos, and again only borrowed how they're composed.

First I set up a calm idle pose in Unity with Karin holding the greatsword, then shot it with an orthographic camera from six angles (±60, ±90, ±120) on a transparent background. I picked the -60 degree angle, where you can see the side of Karin's face and the greatsword reaches up to the right.

In GIMP I cut out the silhouette from the render's alpha, filled it with a sky blue → blue → purple → navy gradient, and carved the outline in as empty lines. I added purple shading only on the dark areas (brightness 33% or lower). I tried treating the bright areas too, but it looked cartoony, so I took it out. Nine brushstrokes flow from the tip of Karin's hair down under the title and then curl up to the right, giving it a wavering feel. The title is set in the tall, narrow Bodoni MT Condensed Bold.

Things I thought about

• No "Tales of." The issue is trademarks more than copyright. Bandai Namco has kept registering "Tales of ○○" as trademarks for games, so it could be risky once I release a demo. It didn't need to be Tales of anyway.
• No Korean subtitle in the logo. The subtitle's Korean name is "Changyeom-ui Janhwa," but the logo only uses the English subtitle.
• Flames only as decoration. I tried a water-drop flame emblem, a rounded five-tongue one and a fanned blade-shaped one, and all of them got cut. Just because the subtitle says "Embers of the Azure Flame" didn't mean I wanted to drop a literal blob of fire into the logo.

Rabbit hole: the render came out blank

When I read back the render texture I'd shot Karin into, I only got an empty image. The cause: a render texture with MSAA turned on comes out blank when you read it with ReadPixels. Turning MSAA off for the render fixed it.

Rabbit hole: overlapping flame strokes turned hollow

I put several flame strokes into a single path, and only the overlapping parts turned into holes. I switched to adding each stroke to the selection one at a time.

Next up

• Check commercial-use permission for the draft fonts (Goudy, Book Antiqua, Perpetua Titling)
• Draft 4 is based on the 3D SD model, so it's closer to a cel-shaded silhouette than a hand drawing. Hand-drawn details like hair strand lines still need to be drawn separately