Quote Originally Posted by Cthulhu View Post
I rather like the shape and heraldic aspects of this games Linkshell indicator. What bothers me most is our color selection. White or Yellow for a base color. Seriously SE, what I would do to a Roegadyn in a Ul'dah back alley for a black and green crest.
The colours and shapes available actually match medieval heraldry. You have two metals (gold/yellow/or and silver/white/argent) and five colours (black/sable, red/gules, green/vert, purple/purpure and blue/azure). Any tincture simmilar to one of these colours is considered to be that colour. For reasons of visibility and recognition, metals and colours are always placed one on top of the other to create contrast. So you can have gold on red, or blue on white, but not white on yellow or purple on blue. The whole point is that you would be able to recognise them from a long way away. And considering we're talking about small icons on potentially distant players, this principle can be considered to apply here as well and all the possible colour combinations are in fact available when considered within these rules.

Those are just some of the more simple examples.

On the topic of shapes, they are also all heraldic ones. A horizontal line is called a bar. A diagonal line is a bend. An arrow-shaped bar is called a chevron. If facing the "wrong" direction, it gets named accordingly, such as "a bend sinister" when the diagonal line is going from top right to bottom left (left handed = sinistral, as opposed to right handed = dextral, the implied norm) or "a chevron inverted" when the arrow is pointing down.

I could go on for hours.