CONTENT WARNING: illustrated depictions of gore, violence and body-horror.
05 June 2023 #commission #logo #design #scifi #supernatural
Reading time: 2 min
You don’t know what lies in the dark matter of space.
Usually, World of Darkness is a tabletop roleplaying game system which lends itself well to werewolves, vampires, and all other sorts of supernaturals that stalk the night.
… but what if the night is all around, all the time, in space?
I’m a big fan of genre mash-ups, especially when science and ‘magic’ comingle. The logistics of vampires finding their next meal in space, or how the many physics we are still ignorant of may not be so much quantum as they are dark magic.
So, when my commissioner wanted a logo for their World of Darkness campaign, I had the unique challenge of communicating both the precision of science-fiction with something a bit more fantastical.
During visual research for this project, it occured to me that both mysticism and modern sci-fi designs made use of fine interconnected lines and geometry, so that was the bridging point between the two genres.
Overall, I had two approaches in mind: warped letters or a symbolic graphic. Since the client had a lot of death and void symbolism to explore in the campaign, naturally a black hole or skull was an appropriate detail. And since this logo design is intended for a fun project rather than something that needed to communicate clearly to an audience, there wasn’t much need for the warp idea to be legible.
And just like how the design couldn’t just be plain old science-fiction or fantasy, the colours needed a sense of bizarre as well, almost uncomfortableness. I discovered, from using colour-balance effects, that a slight neon green along the edges of the primary colours created just enough vivacity, so that was brought into the final design.
While the symbolic graphic won out as a design, one of the warped letter designs based on the acronym of the campaign (AMKATS, or otherwise succinctly known as ‘A Motley Krewe Among The Stars’) still got a final rendition as an alternative.
Is your creative project in need of a logo that pushes symbolic expectations to their limits? Make sure to check out my commission guide and get in touch!
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