KS Nationalism

[Caesius]

If there's one heraldic rule that should generally be followed, it's this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_tincture

The gist is that if two colors or "metals" are difficult to distinguish side-by-side, they should have some form of separation, typically by fimbriation.

In your Shizune design, the dark-gray "stalk" disappears into the navy blue field; this is especially evident in the thumbnail. It needs to be fimbriated with either gold/yellow or silver/white.

Your Misha design can probably get away with not following the rule since pink isn't really a flag color anyway, but you may want to try separating the green from the pink and the shades of pink from each other.

The Hanako one, I think, is the one that most needs to follow the rule. The red and purple blend into and clash with each other. That may have been the point, but if a design element turns out looking bad then you should always change it, no matter how much meaning you put into it.

Edit: You edited in the Emi one while I was posting, but I think you get the idea by now.


Other than that, the Misha and Shizune ones look neat.

[Warwick]

Oh yeah, I forgot about that rule. Thanks for reminding me. I'll take a look at them with a fresh eye in the morning.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I actually had planned for some fimbriation in my original Shizune design, but I wanted to do it using stroke color rather than drawing them myself, which ended up doing odd and ugly things to the edges of the banners. After giving up on that, I decided to eschew separating the colors with outlines (I guess that wasn't so smart).

EDIT2: The joke with Hanako's was that I was trying to invoke a "half-burned" coloring scheme. I might try making it patterned, depending on how time consuming it is.

[Caesius]

EDIT: Come to think of it, I actually had planned for some fimbriation in my original Shizune design, but I wanted to do it using stroke color rather than drawing them myself, which ended up doing odd and ugly things to the edges of the banners.

That's because you put a black border around the banner, which you shouldn't do unless it's actually part of the banner. Forego the border and have silver or gold fimbriation running down the edges of the "stalk," continuing past the points where it disappears into the edge of the banner, and terminating as a point in the bottom corners.

[Warwick]

No, what I meant was that had I used a very thick stroke to do the fimbriation, it would've poked out the side of banner. I snap the ends of my lines to others so that they're seamless, but a very thick stroke means a very large miter, which is what I was referring to with it being odd and ugly. An example attached. Though I did a quick test and if I keep the black border I can probably get away with using a thick stroke as fimbriation. More experimenting will come later.

[Caesius]

You could just let the miter spill over into the outside area and then crop the resulting PNG in another image editing program. If you're having trouble with it spilling out into the area between the "tails," then you can create a triangle in the other image editing program as a layer, select the layer's transparency ("select pixels" in Photoshop), and delete the transparency in the overflow area.