[Background Blog] Designing the new Astatos logo.

Compymono here!

While I have my hands full with stuff behind the scenes we aren't quite ready to show yet, I wanted to share a look into a really cool design I worked on for Astatos.

The original logo for Astatos was designed back in 2019 by Boog, who also did the card designs and illustrations for the tabletop game. 

"Astatos: A Trial of Divinity & Betrayal" is a bit of a mouthful so I broke this down into just the logotype "Astatos" for most places. (This project really did hammer home the correct spelling of "betrayal" into my head, but butter-fingering "trial" and "trail" will forever haunt me.)

I rarely use the base form above except where a single colour vector is needed (like the top of the collector's edition box" or where the original full colour logo would appear too detailed, otherwise it's almost always nicer to use the full one.

Now you may be thinking why the logo looks kinda strange, and that's because it hides a secret... you can read it upside down!

As my wonky trackpad-scribbles demonstrate, each letter in the logo is shaped so it still says "Astatos" when flipped! Conceptually it ties into the game-mechanic of flipping sides. Another detail you can see is the subtle purple shading coming in at the edges of the logo, representing Mukaki's influence spreading— another tie-in to the game itself.

After working on the designs for the tabletop game and video game on-and-off throughout 2020, I made some minor adjustments to the contrast and shading of the logo to improve legibility, but admittedly I was never 100% happy with it from the perspective of a designer. Earlier this year I finally took the initiative and dug into a full analysis and refresh of the logo from scratch. 

Beginning with the base, I straightened out the 5º rotation and drew rulers across the x-height, ascenders, and descenders of the letters in the Astatos logotype.

• The key areas that felt the roughest to read were the starting "A", first "s", and "o".
• The first "s", second "a", and "o" all had different x-heights, making them feel less consistent.
• The two "t" glyphs were different which feels more hand-crafted but isn't good when we're already facing legibility issues.
• Inconsistent shapes and thickness make it obvious that the logotype vector was image traced rather than drawn like that to begin with.

My design process basically had me redrawing each character in the word one at a time, from A to S. When you start to think about it, the original logo had pretty clever ideas on how to make the letters work both ways around in the word, so it definitely gave me a massive head-start over trying to do this from scratch. My goal was to prioritise legibility while not compromising the original design features.

• The "A" letter felt really distinctive and cool, so all I did was smooth out the shape, sharpening the bottom of the inner 's' part and tucking the top closer to the "^" to help emphasise the viewer reading it as "A".
• "s" in the new version mostly uses the same shape, but I shortened the top and thickened the shape to make it looks more like an "s" and improve how you see it at small sizes. It's height was also adjusted to serve as the new x-height of the other letters.
• "t" is generally unchanged but adjusted to be a symmetrical shape that helps it feel consistent. The slanted strike across the t is adjusted to an angle that helps it flow between the letters beside it. This letter is also repeated for the second "t" in the new logo.
• "a" had its height and thickness adjusted to better match the other letters. The main stem of the "a" is extended to emphasise legibility, the angle of this stem also matches the "t" next to it to help fill in the whitespace between the two.
• The original "o" was raised above the height of the other characters and had a disconnected stem below it to form the "s" when it's flipped upside down. Even though it was good at conveying it was an "o", it was also pretty messy so I designed something new inspired by it. The shape of the bend at the bottom also leads into the angle of the stroke on the "t" next to it.
• The "s" had some very sharp points and variations in thickness that were inconsistent with the rest of the logo. I made adjustments to the shape to help it feel like a reflection of the "A", but ultimately kept the inner "s" shape the same because everything else I tried was kinda rough.

While I could work over this logotype forever, eventually I had to call it done and move onto the full-colour version.

Working with one of our concept artists on the game, Totem— we worked to add the original gold-texture onto the new logo shape. We also dropped the lens-flare above the "A" since it was pretty distracting in the original design and felt a lot cleaner without it. The new outline between the letters is based on a gradient from red to purple, representing the division between the gods Makari-Hari and Mukaki.

You can see the new logo is both a lot cleaner to read, and the basic logotype is thicker and works better at smaller sizes. I also managed to keep the ability to read it upside down intact!

While I still can see that it's not a super-easy to read logo, I'm still pretty happy with the improvements we made to it while keeping the original spirit in place. (Honestly, I think a lot of people won't know it's changed unless they saw them side-by-side.) My general rule of thumb is to almost always have "Astatos" somewhere nearby in plain-text wherever the logo will be displayed but it should definitely be a lot better now on it's own!

You'll be sure to see this logo a good deal more often in the future along with a bunch more designs I've been working on over the past few months!

- Compymono