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🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Sun, Mar 10, 2024 01:41 PM UTC in reply to Jean-Louis Cazaux from Tue Mar 5 07:30 PM:

The frog and the fairy are cute but there are more figurines that we could find in any Toys'r'us store than bearing a chess character. There are 3D pieces around. Musketeer chess for example. Or we are several people designing Staunton-like 3D pieces for printing. Importing a .stl into Meshmixer we could make very nice 2D images. I could help if needed.

While I do disagree that the source of the images is an important issue, I am beginning to think there was a real issue behind your response. What has come to mind for me is that the frog and this version of the fairy princess are not as clearly recognizable as Chess variant pieces as the main pieces in the logo should be. While I know that the frog has been used as a Chess variant piece, and I have myself used a frog image to represent the Long Leaper in Ultima, the average visitor to this site would not know that and may wonder what a frog has to do with Chess variants. Also, Chess has nothing like the frog in it, and this piece does not resemble any Chess piece apart from having a Chess piece base. Chess does have a queen, but this fairy princess image does not resemble a queen as much as some others I have generated.

To represent the idea of Chess variants to someone who is not familiar with the pieces being used, they should resemble Chess pieces while also differing from them in some ways. It may also be good to have two pieces that represent different branches of the Chess variant family. The Elephant and the Unicorn did this well, as the Elephant is common in historic and regional variants while a Unicorn is used in some modern variants.

What I have in mind is a dragon horse (or possibly dragon king) to represent Asian variants and a fairy princess (or possibly fairy empress) to represent fairy chess and western variants. A figurine dragon horse piece resembles a knight, and a fairy princess (or empress) piece resembles a queen. In the drafts hidden in the details section, the two pieces could be taken for a knight and a queen from fantasy-themed Chess sets.

Dark Logo Drafts

I'm not entirely happy with these drafts. While I think the fairy princess in the first two looks better on its own, the last one feels more balanced with the dragon horse and fairy princess facing each other. The main problem with AI art is that I don't always get exactly what I want. But it still does a much better job than what I could do on my own. So I may generate more images later and see if any of them turn out better.


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