Dev Blog #11: Finding a Visual Identity

At first, I thought I needed simply needed a logo. It turns out I needed an important lesson in brand design. The old logo was a leather-bound book with gold lettering. It was a good placeholder with some questionable book anatomy: both ends looked like binding.

I started this journey looking for a fresh look, pulling inspiration from fantasy games whose titles had stayed with me: Dragonlance, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, and others. I liked how their lettering and imagery could announce a world before you knew anything about it.

Taking a step back, I decided I wanted the logo to be composed of an "icon" and the title StormTome in special lettering. The first test sheet were deliberately broad. Seeing several directions together helped me separate the lettering I liked from the symbols I wanted to keep.

The Piece Worth Keeping

The first idea that really connected was a fractured emblem. It tied into an idea I had been carrying around for the game: a tome torn into shards, and players occupying different shards of reality. They might see one another while still progressing through their own quests. That is a design idea, rather than a claim that all of it is implemented, but it gave the symbol a reason to exist.

More practically, the emblem could stand on its own. I could imagine it in a browser tab, beside the game's name, or in a small corner where the full title would never fit.

Dark Looked Good Until I Used It

One early direction combined charcoal and purple with heavy, angular lettering. So I generated a high quality rendering and put it over key art.

The dark letters disappeared into the illustration. The purple was there, but it didn't carry enough contrast to make the title easy to read. The second problem was logo was difficult to read with a quick glance becayse of the elaborate letter shapes.

Back to the Light

The first thing to change was the font. The game already used Georgia Bold, so it was a good starting point. The second change was the color. We explored brighter fills: gold, yellow, pearl white, and light purple. Gold and pearl eventually won. They preserved the sense of a fantasy object while making much more of the lettering visible.

Putting those experiments beside one another makes the change in contrast easier to see.

Choosing a Font

For visual consistency, I wanted a font that I could use both in the logo and in the game. That would mean the logo font would need to be distributed for the game. Using the Georgia font would be problematic, as it requires a commercial license for distribution. So we explored different font alternative.

We started with a sheet exploring the feel and readability of different letter shapes. We quickly discovered that Codex has generate theoridical fonts. So we continued the exploration, explicitly started with wanted to use a font that existed.

I settled on Lora, particularly its bold weight. It gave me readable serif lettering that could still sit comfortably in a fantasy interface. The project now bundles Lora for the game and serves the same font release for blog headings, so its availability does not depend on what a player happens to have installed.

The release we use is under the SIL Open Font License. The official OFL FAQ distinguishes making a graphic with a font from distributing the font software itself. It permits use in logos and bundling with software, subject to the applicable license conditions.

For StormTome, we keep the copyright and license notices with the bundled fonts and expose them on the third-party licenses page. A future native app would need to carry the relevant notices with its font resources too; a web link alone is not our packaging plan.

Readable, but Was It Still Fantasy?

At this point, I liked the brighter emblem and the more readable title. But something had gone missing. The clean symbol beside the name started to feel more like a technology company than a fantasy RPG. So we went back to sketches. There were forged-metal frames, a broken seal, carved stone, and ornamental lettering.

This was the point where the comparison became less about color and more about the kind of world the logo suggested. The stone treatment felt ancient and physical; the illuminated version felt closer to a storybook. The fractured emblem remained recognizable across all four.

Then my daughter said she liked the old book. That brought us back to something I had been too quick to discard. The old design had communicated fantasy immediately. However, out exploration has taught us several lesson

• The font coloring needed to be simple and light
• Having the word Storm and Tome in different color made the title easier to read
• We wanted to use the Lora font
• We wanted to use the fractured icon

One More Fix Wasn't Always an Improvement

This is where the image-editing process became a lesson of its own. The book needed corrections. Even after correcting the binding, had several problems: extra leather straps, overlapping binding, corners curling up, etc. It took several edits to fix all the imperfections. However, after multiple regeneration, the whole image looked worse.

The letter edges became less clean. The emblem's facets grew muddy. Gold fittings lost their deliberate shapes, and the leather picked up a cloudy texture. It's like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Each generation would fix a problem, be deteriorate the overall image.

The only solution was to ask Codex to rebuilt the image from scratch, with stricker instructions. The result was much sharper, but it also brought back a couple of unwanted details. For the last corrections, we asked the tool to regenerated only the areas requiring corrections. The rest of the image should be a pixel copy.

A Family of Logos

The result is the long ornamental logo: the book, the emblem, and the title together. Its short ornamental companion keeps the book and fractured emblem without the lettering.

The exploration took us away from the book and then back to it, but it wasn't a return to the starting point. We came back with a recognizable small symbol, font and color choices that could extend into the game, and a much better understanding of what made the name readable.

I also came back with a healthier respect of brand design, and the challenges that are associated with it.