Introducing the New 17th Shard Logos!

Hello everyone! We have some pretty exciting news for you today: we are going to change the logos across 17th Shard, the Coppermind, and Arcanum! These new logos are made by Raul Chaves, who we hired based off a brand identity for Allomancy that he did. We've wanted to make our logos more modern for quite a while, and I hope you'll agree that they turned out awesome:

We have had the same logo for 17th Shard since 2016, the iconic glass shard with the 17 broken into pieces over it, and that 2016 logo wasn't very different from our original 2010 design. Both were made by Will Raboin (Shivertongue on the forums, but he's been out of the fandom for some time), and I have always been fond of them. 

But, we wanted to make the 17th Shard logo flatter and more modern. We also wanted a simpler silhouette, which has a few advantages, in particular, future merchandise possibilities. The old look was quite poor for merch as it did not work well in monochrome, and required a pretty specific color scheme to be visible. You couldn't exactly put the old logo on a dark background! Also, the wordmark (that is, the text on the logo) was a bit too complicated, with a gradient on the word "Shard." We still wanted to try and evoke some of the same feel of the old logo though, with a similar shape that also evokes a bit of shattering.

Another benefit to this logo refresh was that it allowed us to start the process of unifying the design of 17th Shard, the Coppermind Wiki, and Arcanum, so that all our three sites feel more cohesive together. Now we have the common silhouette on all sites, with the same accent gold color.

The Coppermind logo was... very old, and actually based off of the 2010 17th Shard logo, which had a green glowing gradient around the broken glass. Yikes, that was old. It's a huge improvement to get this updated, since realistically, even in 2010, we didn't love the Coppermind logo. We wanted to evoke a symbol from the Steel Alphabet, but also not use that icon directly.

Arcanum's logo is the most recent of our three logos, coming out in 2017. This logo is my favorite of our three, and actually inspired the designs. The old logo was made by KChan--another retired staff member who was on some earlier Shardcasts, and who helped with a lot of colors on 17th Shard--who had the great idea of putting an A inside the cosmere logo. I love the Arcanum logo, but there are some problems with doing that. The cosmere symbol isn't easily scalable to a small icon, and also, having the art directly from the books in the logos would lead to issues in future merchandise. We still wanted to keep that A symbol very visible, as that's the defining feature of the current logo.

One other advantage to a flatter design is that it allows us to adapt the logo to fit with various background schemes, such as a dark colored shirt vs. a light colored shirt, or an eventual "dark mode" on our websites. In particular, Arcanum will still have a solid dark color in its header, but you can still immediately recognize this as the Arcanum logo:

We will be updating our logos on these sites, as well as our social media icons and Discord server icons, within the next week or so. Arcanum, in particular, will be refreshed with a green aesthetic over its current blue, as 17th Shard will have a blue theme and we want each color scheme to be distinct. Here are some screenshots of how they might look on the sites themselves (but know these are subject to change):

Let us know what you think in the comments! Having our three main websites use a similar design language will really help tie them together, but the logos are just one part of that process. You can expect as things move forward that 17th Shard, the Coppermind, and Arcanum will start to have their overall designs change as well so things feel cohesive, but that's going to be a while away. Another long-term goal is to have some merchandise to sell eventually. But, in the meantime, we loved how these logos turned out so much that we want to unveil them now, and bigger redesigns will come much later.

Thank you to Raul for some truly fantastic work! Every penny spent on this was well worth it.