Dungeons & Dragons is an iconic role-playing game, which has inspired cartoon series, books, video games, and even movie projects. Due to its widespread success and influence it even has an adaptation in development.
Hasbro has made an outstanding comeback with their recent logo. An outside design team created an eye-catching dragon ampersand design which both respectable and epic in its representation of Hasbro toys, before having it coated in chrome steel to protect it further.
Origins
Dungeons and Dragons has undergone tremendous change throughout its existence, and its logo has seen many iterations over time to represent changing cultural styles and environments. While many players may recognize these variations of its emblematic wordmark, do they ever stop to consider why?
The original D&D logo combined the color red - symbolizing strength and power - and a dragon, representing danger and adventure - into one striking design, providing the ideal visual for a game about traveling faraway places and encountering hidden threats that would not exist in real life.
The D&D ampersand logo perfectly utilizes proximity as a design principle, which suggests that objects appear more meaningful when they are closer together. While applying proximity strictly can work well in logo design, too strictly can make an otherwise striking logo less enigmatic than it could otherwise be. Robin Williams of The Non-Designer's Design Book discusses this topic well in Chapter 2, entitled "Proximity." The ampersand symbol from D&D uses this principle brilliantly and has become one of its own symbols.
Characteristics
The logo for D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) consists of two easily recognisable symbols - red and a dragon (formulating an ampersand). Red symbolizes adventure and danger that are key themes within Dungeons and Dragons as well as passion and emotional peak; on the other hand, dragons symbolize evil and chaos.
This summer, D&D unveiled a brand-new logo alongside their major rules overhaul. It dispenses with medieval lettering and textures present in previous versions while maintaining an overall fantasy vibe. According to Brand New, Hasbro hired an outside team for ampersand design while keeping wordmark consistent throughout.
The new logo is small and fits together well, while still being easy to read and requiring little correction for proximity. According to Robin Williams' book The Non-Designer's Design Book, proximity refers to when several objects come close enough together so as to form an integrated visual unit rather than individual units.
Variations
Dungeons and Dragons has gone through various iterations of its logo throughout its existence. Each has come to represent its fantasy theme differently.
The current version of the D&D logo boasts a modern yet classic aesthetic. Utilizing uppercase font, its primary focus is an uppercase "D", while its ampersand features an ampersand in the form of an image depicting a fiery dragon breathing out fire - an appropriate emblematic motif to represent D&D games.
Red is the color most associated with D&D, symbolizing passion, seduction, danger, and adventure. The intricate dragon symbol has different interpretations for different people depending on their location and cultural background.
Robin Williams describes the principle of proximity in her book The Non-Designer's Design Book; according to this theory, objects near each other will be perceived as one unit and thus become perceived as part of one logo design. Unfortunately, however, applying this logic would seem counter-intuitive when applied to logo designs meant to stand out.
