Xanadu II Translation Development Blog

[SamIAm]

Thanks, Phase! I dig it!

Could you try making the II a little sleeker, and increasing the amount of space between the words?

I whipped another one up real quick. This kind of thing would be hard to shade, but I don't think it looks terrible. The tips of the lowercase H and D I could do without...


(239x31)

Right now, I'm looking at stuff of the fancy-thin-liney variety, and most of it doesn't work. Since we need a light blue outline around a dark blue-green primary color, it seems necessary to keep some real width in there.

Using cursive because Falcom used cursive seemed reasonable enough to me at first, but I'm starting to think that if we have to stick with this color scheme, where the line can never be thinner than three pixels wide and needs to be four for shading, we're probably better off going with some kind of italicized print unless we can find a simple fat cursive that doesn't look bad.

The extra width forced by the outline might keep us from wanting to use the original cursive style. That, and the fact that it is a bit on the gaudy side.  Anyway, Phase, if you don't mind making a couple of quick modifications like I mentioned above, I'd really love to see what it looks like.

[SamIAm]

(239x31)

I tried bolding and shading the last one I made. The X got funky when I modified away some of the weirdness introduced by the bolding, and I still don't like the nightcaps on the d and h. Also, at the moment, the shading is a little harsh - I used only the darker of the two colors.

Overall, not too shabby.

[elmer]

I gave it a shot, tried to make it like the cover art.
Not sure how it would look on a tv could be too aliased?

That's very interesting, thanks!

I think that it looks too blurred at the moment with the letters running into each other, but it looks like you've got plenty of space to space things out a bit more.

The exterior anti-aliasing is also a bit too heavy at the moment.

The big thing that it shows, is that going in that direction is unlikely to give enough pixels to keep the interior drop-shadow that's in the original Japanese logo.

[NightWolve]

Another not-awesome-but-thought-provoking mock-up:

Oh, dear Sam, that may be one of the ugliest mock-ups that I've ever seen ... I could even have nightmares! 

Heh, yeah, non-starter!

[esteban]

Here is my mock-up (Original font):

 

[NightWolve]

Hahahahaha!!!!

Where did that come from

[Dicer]

Not diggin the cursive...

[SamIAm]

That one I posted was just an experiment to see if I could get shadable, legible cursive letters in 240x32. 

Here's another version of that last one I posted. I removed the nightcaps, though the tips could still be improved, and I enlarged the II.



If I do anything else to it, it will be to increase the height of the capital T and L by a pixel or two.

Next, I'll try a straighter, possibly thicker and more rigid font.

[Phase]

http://www.ektophase.com/TG16/Xan2.png  -old
Here's a cleaner version no outer anti-aliasing, bigger word spacing, slight inner shadow. The II would have to be remade to match. Would take more work to add a bigger gap to the letters. I could work on it if you guys liked were it is going. but not sure if its gonna get too much better, its kind of an extreme cursive to do in the limited resolution.

Edit: cleaned slightly more and added a basic 2

[SamIAm]

It definitely brings a smile to my face (you know, in the good way).

If there is anything else you feel like doing to it, I'd love to see it. On the other hand, if you want to hold back on sinking more time into it for now, that's fine, too. We're in a very experimental phase at the moment.

Anyway, I'm really happy that we have this avenue explored now, so thanks again!

[Phase]

No problem, yeah its always cool to see different concepts.

Here is a certain font we all know(hint look at my avatar) but it actually looks kinda rpg like, kind of like final fantasy slim letters

[SamIAm]

Cool! I hadn't tried any uniform-size all-caps solutions yet, but I might have to soon.

I'm still searching for a font that takes the plain mixed upper-lowercase in the direction I'd like to see it go, too.

[Phase]

I edited my last post with the cursive font added a matching 2 in there or something.

[SamIAm]

After more failed experiments, I went back and tweaked this one some more:



- Increased size of T, L, and X.
- Tweaked tips of d and h (maybe made them worse, though)
- Merged II
- Moved things a little closer together - now it's 234x29

I find it highly unlikely that anything I make is actually going to wind up being used, but nonetheless, this is pretty fun. It's actually the first time I've ever fooled around in a modern graphics editor, and the first time I've drawn pixels since high school. 

[elmer]

Thanks, that definitely looks better to me.

But the letters still blur together too much inside the words IMHO. 

its kind of an extreme cursive to do in the limited resolution.

Yes, it is, and I'm absolutely amazed at how faithfully you've reproduced all the curly details in the box art in such a low resolution.

Great job! 

The main logo itself is 196 pixels wide, but you'd only need another 13 pixels to add 1 pixel space between each letter to separate them, which would still be well within the 224 pixel limit for Xanadu 1.

It would mean reducing the new "II" a little in order to fit in Xanadu 2's 240 pixel limit, though.

Do you think that the extra 1 pixel would be enough to work with, and still look good?

No problem, yeah its always cool to see different concepts.

Here is a certain font we all know(hint look at my avatar) but it actually looks kinda rpg like, kind of like final fantasy slim letters

I'm a bit worried that it looks too much like the Final Fantasy logo, and it really has no connection to anything in Falcom's original artwork ... but it's clean and readable and I've always loved using small-caps as a solution for avoiding inconvenient descenders like on the 'g'. 

After more failed experiments, I went back and tweaked this one some more:

Actually, I really, really like this.

It's not as faithful to the box art as Phase's logo is, but it's got the same "flavor" to me, and it's clean and readable.

The tail on the 'f' helps stop the tail on the 'g' from looking so lonesome and out-out-place in the absence of all the curly extras from the T, L and X.