Vintage Story Cover Art Rebrand

[Mannus]

Keep the old logo

[Spaturno]

New one is
1) too cartoonish
2) too cramped of features to be a small logo

love the designer, but I think this is one of the rare cases when devs should NOT listen to the community, maybe

[Major_tom]

I agree that the logo needs to change, but i cant say that i like the new one either. 

Its too busy, and doesnt really work as a logo tbh. Also dont think it fits the vibe of the game.

A logo is really important, and i think this needs more work and iterations.

[Setej]

12 minutes ago, Kaisentlaia said:

I agree with what many said: the new logo looks great as an illustration in a void, but it's too cluttered and busy to be a logo (even more than the old one), the color palette is too bright, and I think it doesn't fit well with the overall vibe/aesthetic of the game.

Although an illustration style will never perform well as a small icon I feel like it fits better with the game. Maybe making it more squareish and pixelated (taking advantage of the wonderful textures already present in game) could be a good idea to update it without straying too far from the original style

It would still lose a lot of detail when scaled down to an icon, but I think it would still be as recognizable as the current one:

I just want to say really like the idea of using pixel art!

As to the main question for this thread, though, what if the logo design was just plain simplified?

So, in case the image doesn't load:

The main image is that of a rusty gear with a tree growing from it, the roots of the tree coming around and through the gear itself. The centre of the gear would have the clock face, or could have the letters VS over it, depending on where it's being used. Meanwhile, the tree trunk and leaves come above the gear asymmetrically, to make the whole image a bit more dynamic. For the website or anywhere a larger version of the logo is used, the words Vintage Story would go on either side of this tree/gear/clock, while the VS letters would only happen on the logo version without the full words.

You could also do this with just the gear/clock and no tree, but the more I think about it, the more I actually like the tree also being there, because it really nicely conveys that the world that we enter into when we play the game has grown over the bones of something else- something findable if we look deep enough. Which is exactly how the lore/ruins/story locations work. Also, it conveys that the world may look fresh, but looks can be deceiving (tying in more with both the mystery of what happened and the unease brought by the game's eldritch elements), and works as an invitation to enter into the world to find out more.

It gives all the major strokes of the original logo, but more streamlined, more focused. It also leaves open the possibility of making an alternate version with a temporal gear instead of a rusty gear, which would be a great option for merch alongside the rusty gear version. Or an animated version of the logo to bring out on special occasions, since the tooltip for temporal gears say they spin by themselves 

You'd still have to sort out the art style of the final version and all, but I really think having a more simplified design to start off with would give really good bones to build off of, if you know what I mean.

[Pascaloubicou]

Hard vote, original is not ready to go... 

[morutedollie]

As much as I love change, and I think a new logo is not a bad idea. . The reworked one looks like it would be more fitting as a Minecraft modpack instead of a full game logo. Where is the grime, the rust, the muted colours? I love that about Vintage Story, this looks too cartoonish. 

 

[celestialapparition]

The reworked version definitely, it just reflects the game style better.

Others have brought up some good points about the new one, especially when they tested it as a game and in the menu. It’s slightly too saturated, and I think the text gets the tiniest bit lost when it’s over the gears as opposed to empty space.

[Wandour]

My idea  didnt feel the clock fit anywhere since we already use those gears
also couldnt find a place to fit in the logo LOL maybe in the middle between the grass and trunk  

[Biryin]

Respectfully, I always thought the original logo was terrible; amateurish and filled with tiny details and clutter that didn't read well at all for a logo.

The new example has better quality, but i think it still doesn't work because it has so many things and colors and barely has a composition, probably due to being a direct adaptation from the original.

I think it'd be good to rethink the logo as a whole in order to have something more simple.

(I think the overall graphical aspect of the game is still a bit messy, specially the older assets, but I'm not going to get into that.)

[Mathoul]

7 minutes ago, celestialapparition said:

The reworked version definitely, it just reflects the game style better.

Others have brought up some good points about the new one, especially when they tested it as a game and in the menu. It’s slightly too saturated, and I think the text gets the tiniest bit lost when it’s over the gears as opposed to empty space.

Are we playing the same game?

[Wandour]

15 minutes ago, Setej said:

I just want to say really like the idea of using pixel art!

As to the main question for this thread, though, what if the logo design was just plain simplified?

So, in case the image doesn't load:
 

you gave me an idea

[Alatyr]

The new version is no better than the previous one.

[Night085]

I like the idea of changing up the logo, and the new logo isn't bad, but it kind of goes against a lot of what the game already looks like with its already established style in game disregarding ui which is probably subject to change if this goes through. I mean that in the best way that I can mean it in that of just looking at screen shots of the game, and the backdrops in the main menu plus the featured builds you share with the community you can kind of already tell it doesn't fit too well and I personally would somewhat dislike if the ui and fonts in game changed to match the blocky style that is being proposed (esp the wood texturing thats my own gripe.)
All in all, there is also just a lot going on and it wont look great when scaled down as a logo, maybe use it for this page or even the modding tab because that is a pretty neat idea imo because it is good art but the older design fits the games already established base better than the new one, once you can nail both fitting in and something new I am all for it though.

[ShubiMaja]

I appreciate the new modern/blocky direction. But I think the logo is still too noisy by modern logo design standards. As was mentioned above, both are distant from logos In that sense.
However, I think the unique tree shape and angled pipe in particular provide an opportunity to create a simple and recognizable logo that is not overcluttered.

Edit: removed content aided by AI generation to make this post less offensive.

 

Edited April 24 by ShubiMaja

[Zodiark Angel]

I like the reworked one more but im not too keen on all the squares in the tree and ground. You should also add some mushrooms in the tree shade!

[Dog1e]

To be completely honest, I'm not a fan of the new one. Don't get me wrong, it does look pretty cool, and I can see a lot of thought put into it to incorporate the new look with the old logo's structure in mind. However, it does not give off the same vibe anymore. For me, it kind of gives the impression of a fantasy, sugary adventure game, unlike the old logo, whose art style really gives that natural, harsh survival vibe by using no outlines and kind of blurry colours that are also not that vibrant.

So, to summarize, I think that both logos are really cool, but the new one just doesn't give me that specific Vintage Story vibe, and I think the logo is the part of the product that should do that as best as it can. The original logo wins here for me.

[The Phoenixian]

I think the silhouette of the new proposal is significantly improved. The gears and mechanical parts stand out in this version where before they were much subtler elements that only stood out on closer inspection. Overall, there's significantly more balance between the natural and mechanical elements now. The text of the logo does interfere with the largest gear silhouette, but I'm not sure how much of a problem that is or isn't.

As far as style and detail goes I'm torn. The proposed new logo does highlight the elements of the game more, but it doesn't match the color and style of the game itself. It feels somewhat caught up in trying to display the nature and mechanics of the game, (blocky wood, temporal gears) over the basic ideas.

If you're trying to draw imagery to the rust world, the living world, and the connections and contrast between them, it might be worth drawing a shaper divide in imagery. Clean angles for gears and mechanical parts vs more flowing and organic shapes for the, well, organic parts.

[Henninator]

I like the washed, rounder design of the older one more. It kind of has this subtile rusted flair that fits with the game. I also think that the new one is too cluttered to look coherent at a glance. The segmented tree parts look a bit off in my opinion and could use a bit of smoothing.  That being said, I think that if it were simpler, the logo would look great!

[Thap]

There is still no clocks, much less clocktrees (is there any connection to Grossman's Magicians?) in the game. The logo in either version no way represents the game.

[Korzhikman]

Honestly i think we should put flax twine as the logo cause its one of the main resources in the game

[Psyloh]

As @meikah said : not a logo!
As @Quickness said : not inline with the overall artistic direction, mostly colorwise
Looks a bit AI : lacks some sense of identity x_x

And as @Thap said : clocks don't exist in the game! Gears and a rusting tree would be enough for an illustration but, for a logo, less is more ^^' (or the other way around?)

Edited April 24 by Psyloh

[Malachi Meeker]

Third place- New logo. It looks fresh, but too cluttered.

Second place- Original logo. Classic, simple, doesn’t have too much going on. 
 

First place-  The rusty gear logo submitted by Nicodemus.  Simple, looks fantastic scaled down. Feels like it a better representation of the game, in comparison to the tree clock. Peak perfection.

Regardless of which logo is used, having a small butterfly somewhere on the logo would be a wonderful little addition.

Moses.

4 hours ago, Nicodemus said:

In my opinion, a game logo should look good even when scaled down, and neither the old nor the new version does that.
But if I had to choose, I’d keep the old one because I think the new one looks too much like an “AI” design.

Edit: why not use a simple rusty gear  with moss and maybe mushrooms on top?

Edit: I've always had something like this in mind:

 

[Thalius]

I like the new one, but resonate with a lot of the comments already made. It's too "sharp" looking, and the colors are too vibrant. It looks like something I'd see for a new feature in Terraria or some similar vibe. Vintage Story has always had a more earthy and muted feel to it, and the logo feels out of place for that reason alone.

Of course it'll fit a lot better if an entire UI overhaul comes with it. It'll take some getting used to for those of us that have been around here a while, but we'll get over it. The game's artwork and UI screens are due for some love after all these years.

I've included an image that feels closer to how I'd envision it. Edited with an AI generator. I'm not a graphics artist and stand zero chance of crafting anything remotely worth sharing without using tools, but this gets close to what I'd envision that sits in between the older logo and the new one.

[Sormiel]

The reworked logo is arguably of higher quality, but to me, its style feels out of place in Vintage Story. The line art and stepped gradients clash with the game's art style, and I feel that the "modern" look could mislead more people into expecting the game to be a simple Minecraft clone.

I do like the overall composition and the attention to details, though, and think that a logo rework would be good. The old tree's leaves look quite unfinished, as do the rocks below the grass.
Also, as some have already pointed out, a simpler logo or a simplified version of the main logo would do good for small thumbnails and the like.

At any rate, I think both make appropriate logos.

[Paweleczek]

I think remaked logo its like generated by ai