Designing Game Logos

In preparation for hopefully releasing Folk Tale on Steam Early Access next month, we needed to re-design the game logo. Pooling my prior marketing experience and Jennifer's artistic abilities, we set to work designing one of the most prominent assets and documenting the process in the hope it might help other indie developers, or simply be of interest to members of the Folk Tale community.

The Brief

Before any visualization work was started, I prepared the creative brief that Jennifer would be working from, splitting design goals into mandatory ( 'must' ) and optional ( 'should' ) including: 

Typography

With the creative brief in hand, Jennifer set about selecting a number of candidate font faces, and presenting a black and white candidate board for consideration. Typography ( aka 'the font' ) can communicate so much about a product that quite often you'll see game logos made purely from typography without additional artwork. It demands the greatest attention of all elements in a logo, and preparing a simple black and white board helps focus purely on the type. For illustration purposes, here are four fonts that communicate four very different things:

Four fonts communicating very different things

Kerning, line spacing, and weight all needed consideration before arriving at the final font face. We didn't want a lightweight font that was too thin because it would get lost at small scale and not support the 'rubber stamp' goal. The default kerning ( spacing between characters ) was also too broad, so we condensed it.

Styling

It should really have been included in the creative brief, but early on we found that Jennifer would require direction on where within the style spectrum the logo should sit. We didn't want pure illustration which is often more aligned with cartoons and products targeting children, nor does the in-game art style focus on realism. Using other games and logos as references, I was able to communicate the desired art style.

Art Style Scale

Early Theme Concepts

With our selection made from the candidate fonts, Jennifer set about developing rough theme concepts. As all but one would be throw-away work they were quick and dirty, in some cases pulling from in-game textures.

Early Theme Concepts

The team ( representing the target audience demographic of gamers aged 18-34 ) really liked the tree rings texture and green for the leaves; the orange leaves were lost against the brown of the tree ring board. The metal color of the font would introduce an additional resource from the game ( wood, iron, stone, food ).

Concept Refinement

Having identified elements from the early theme concepts that we wanted to take forward, we added a few more ideas and Jennifer set about refining the concept.

Concept Refinement

We tried different alignments, and settled with a broader offset that would allow us to add a prop. The oak tree further compounded the leaves at the edges of the logo, so this was ruled out because it didn't add to either the 'story' being told or visual impact. The rendered in-game ruin was discounted because it didn't feel right. The sword and shield however developed the 'story' by adding a hint of adventure to the theme. It still felt a bit busy, so we dropped the shield from the design.

Key Design Features

With the final elements chosen and checked against the design goals, it was time to add the detail. Throughout development various tweaks were made, including

Key Design Features

Testing

A final round of testing was performed to check for any scaling issues, and to validate the logo would work in nearly all scenarios.  Below is but one of the test slides. 

Testing

Minor refinements were made during testing, and three weeks after the initial meeting, we had our final logo:

Final Logo Design

About Folk Tale

Folk Tale is a fantasy city-builder strategy adventure game for PC, Mac and Linux developed by indie studio Games Foundry. For more information, please visit www.gamesfoundry.com.