User blog:Aaron Larsen/Icon Overview

I've been meaning to put up a blog post giving kind of an overview of what I'm trying to accomplish with them. The key challenge is to get convey idea of the deity/ faction/ city in as few pixels as possible while still maintaining recognizable themes. I used the symbols from the Campaign Guide (CG) as much as possible. In fact, with the first 12 factions it was relatively straightforward. The Deities were a bit of a challenge, as some of the symbols from the CG were not AT ALL conducive to reducing to pixel-based icons, but fortunately each one had an alternative symbol already listed on the wikia (e.g., the Wildmother's sea shell and Ioun's crook-and-eye) that worked MUCH better. Then I got to the cities. For the cities I created a "theme look" that tied together the style of the city icons within each nation: the cities of Tal'Dorei were built off of thematic elements drawn from the Council of Tal'Dorei symbol, but each with a different color and an initial for each for quick recognition. For the Empire, each was built around the thematic element of the "crossed iron bars" motif I came up with for the Empire, plus the most Germanic-looking letter for the city initial that I thought was still recognizable... and once again gave each their own color scheme for both variety and quick recognition. For the Clovis Concord cities, I built each around the anchor-on-a-blue-sea logo I'd come up with for the Clovis Concord but made the initial the shape for quick recognition.

So that's the basic outline. The idea was to create a rational and systematic iconography for our info boxes that would also aid in quick recognition and just generally help the Wikia to look its best! The table below perhaps expresses some of those thematic relationships better than words can. It doesn't contain all of them: it's missing about the latest half-dozen or so (as I was no longer able to fit all of them on a one-page Word table when I added those) but I think it gets the idea across of what I've been trying to accomplish...

Once again, your friendly neighborhood iconographer, Aaron G Larsen