Charcoal Emblems

Charcoal Emblems is a set of 26 crests, insignia and rank marks drawn in the hand-drawn style, where every edge is sampled and nudged, so no line is truly straight. It contains seven crest carriers, a name plaque, a pin badge, an open and a closed wreath ring, two winged mounts, an abstract sigil, a service sash, five countable rank chevrons, three star ranks, two medals and a service ribbon.

A faction emblem has to belong to the game it is in, which is exactly what a finished emblem cannot do: put a wolf head on a guild crest and the crest belongs to that artist rather than to the player. Most of this set is therefore a carrier rather than a finished mark — the shield, the seal, the lozenge, the banner and the winged mount all ship with an empty field sized for an icon you already have.

The wobble is deterministic rather than random: the same box wobbles the same way every build, which is what lets it live in version control. Shading is cross-hatching, because a gradient under a drawn line reads as a filter rather than as a hand.

Inside that style this is the Charcoal reading of it: a dark interface on a smoke grey palette with ember orange accents, built around a single bordered frame, tab-shaped buttons at 160x52, hollow-cored bars divided into 7 segments, and two-tone icons on a 24px grid. Those measurements are why two families can share an art style without being interchangeable: the style decides how an edge is drawn, the numbers decide what the interface is for.

The seven carriers are a shield, a round seal, a lozenge, a hexagon, an arch, a hanging banner and a pennant — enough that two factions in the same grid do not have to share a silhouette. Rank is countable rather than coloured: one to five chevrons, plus a separate star series, so the tier survives a greyscale screenshot and does not collide with the faction colour the emblem is tinted with. No letters are drawn anywhere in the set — embedding a font is a licensing problem and a baked-in initial is wrong for every studio but one, so the carriers give you the frame and your engine prints the mark. The wreath ships open and closed: the gap is what makes the open one read as a wreath at thumbnail size, and the closed one is the ring a seal needs.

Every sprite ships as an editable SVG and as transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x, so you can drop the PNGs straight into an engine or open the vector and change a colour. Built to the same measurements as the rest of the Charcoal family, which means this kit and the Charcoal panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for notebook and storybook games.

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