Kind of curious about why Turbine’s ex-developers formed their new indie studio with the name Standing Stone Games? And what is up with that rather… prominent logo design? So were we, which is why we read with rapt attention the explanation behind the name and the studio’s logo.
The story of the proposed Standing Stone logo unfolded quickly and intensely over the course of a week. It began on day one with polling the development team for their ideas… images, photos, thumbnails, written descriptions…anything that could help us capture what was in the team’s imagination, and that might help us explore the possibility space for the logo. These ideas were then distilled down into a series of general concepts which were cataloged in a document and then used to inspire an initial series of thumbnails.
In time, after several quick rounds of iteration, there were just a few candidates remaining and the general consensus was gravitating toward the tower with the ‘floaty bits’.
That it is not as literal an interpretation of ‘standing stone’ as the other logo candidates was perhaps the most instrumental consideration in singling out the final proposed design. We were excited that its less orthodox treatment was more conceptually open and allowed a broader range of interpretations and possibilities to be read into it or to be spun out of it.
This was considered appealing as we want Standing Stone Games to have the flexibility to span themes and genres and not seem genre bound to fantasy. We liked what that says about the company… you don’t know what to expect.
Other qualities we found ourselves compelled by in the proposed design include that the floaty bits are also part of a rich array of qualities implied in the logo. The logo is a little window into a world where there is fluidity, solidity, gravity, anti-gravity, physics, magic, all kinds of implied movement and transformation…all suggested with no explicit, specific subject and, importantly, a lack of explicit scale cues. It’s elegant, evocative, it holds the promise of going anywhere…
Finally, it should not be omitted that the complexity the floaty bits add help relieve what might otherwise be an inappropriately phallic design.
Standing Stone Games is now handling the development of LOTRO and DDO while farming out the publishing duties to Daybreak.
