The idea of our variant of Blazonry is that people construct a recognizable and unique logo for their faction. This logo will then be used by the galaxy map (and possibly other tools), and could be used as the 'official' faction logo when no other logo is used (this still requires saving the image and uploading it to the wiki though). Since using a bitmap editing tool to create logo's is a lot of work (and it is difficult to get a logo looking good when it is really small) you can just write down your logo as if painting it.

You can use the Blazonry Preview ß2 tool to design your logo. If you can spare some time, play around with it for a bit and try to get a logo that you would really like for your faction.

The tool consists of a single input bar and three black circles. You type your logo description in the input bar, and if it is correct the three circles are updated with the logo. If something goes wrong, the tool will tell you what went wrong.

The large and medium circle are just there to get a good look at your logo at different sizes. The smallest circle is the exact size of a system on the galaxy map. If your logo looks good there, it will probably look good on the map as well.

Blazonry allows you to use simple language to describe the logo. You describe your logo as if you were painting it on a large circle. First off you tell the tool what treatment (a colour or pattern of colours) to use for the background, then you add extra overlays with different treatments.

The simplest example is Green. This just paints the whole circle green.

You can get fancy with Party per pale green and gold. The 'party per' part of this logo tells the tool to split the background in two parts and paint them green and gold. The 'pale' is the direction of the split. You can also split per fess, per bend, per bend sinister, per cross, per saltire, per chevron, per chevron inverted, and per quarter.

On top of the background you put one or more ordinaries or charges. Like Or a bend gules, which is a golden circle, with a red line from top-left to bottom-right. You can apply any kind of treatment you like to a charge or ordinary, Or a bend party per fess vert and gules for example, splits the diagonal line in two, and paints the top green and the bottom red. You can have fun with the following other ordinaries and charges: cross, fess, pale, saltire, chevron, pall, bordure, roundel, annulet, and ring. You can stick multiple ordinaries on top of each Vert a fess gules and an annulet or.

You've probably noticed how most of these things sound quite old. This is because I did not think up new names for the divisions, ordinaries and charges. The most common old colours can be used: Or, Sable, Gules, Azure, Vert, Purpure, and Argent. But, you can also use their new names: Gold, Black, Red, Blue, Green, Purple, Silver, but also these new ones: White, Yellow, and Orange. If that's not enough colours for you, try using hexadecimal notation #ff00ff, or even rgb(128,255,255).

You can also use transparency with 'proper' or 'transparent'. See this example. Take care, transparency has some weird behaviour. You can only use it as the 'most significant' color, meaning it should be the first color in a 'party per (divisor) (first treatment) and (second treatment)'.

If you tell the tool a 'party per', charge or ordinary you can append a rotation to it. Compare Or a chevron gules and Or a chevron inverted gules. The following rotations are understood: sinister (sinister rotates 90 degrees counter-clockwise), inverted (inverted rotates 180 degrees), 45cw (any number directly followed by cw turns the number of degrees clockwise), and 45ccw (any number directly followed by ccw turns the number of degrees counter-clockwise).

It is also possible to shift a charge or party. This is done by using the words gauche (left), and droite (right). You can also enter a number: 0.4, or negative -0.4. These can be combined with the rotations.

Once you have a faction logo you're happy with, store it on the wiki. Edit your faction's page and add the logo description in the data entry of your faction. For example “Logo: Vert a saltire Gules”.

If you have a # in your logo description, the wiki needs you to change this to \# when writing it down on the wiki.

This section is meant for other technically minded people, but might help you while figuring out what to tell to the tool. This grammar is not in any normal form, but can probably be read without to much difficulty.

(logo):
	(treatment) (ordinaries)

(treatment):
	(color)
	Party per (divisor) (translation)? (rotation)? (treatment) and (treatment)

(ordinaries):
	[a|an] (ordinary) (translation)? (rotation)? (treatment) (and (ordinaries))?

(color):
	or, sable, gules, azure, vert, purpure, argent, proper
	gold, black, red, blue, green, purple, silver, white, yellow, green, orange, transparent
	#ff0000, etc.
	rgb(123,123,123), etc.

(divisor):
	pale, fess, bend, cross, saltire, chevron, quarter

(ordinary):
	cross, fess, pale, bend, saltire, chevron, pall, bordure, roundel, annulet

(rotation):
	sinister, inverted
	45cw, 45ccw, etc.

(translation):
	gauche, droite
	-0.5, -0.432155, 0.4343, etc.