Challenge

The Stock Pot Inn is a fictional inn in the game Majora's Mask. Aside from a bell that serves as a landmark and a sign out front there isn't much in the way of a specific Identity, but from the story elements both outright stated and implied there is much to work with to establish an identity.

The sign itself is a golden moon with blue accents, and this actually implies a lot about what the owners might've been trying to communicate about their establishment.

The inn is located in East Clock Town, specifically right next to the entryway that connects East and South clock town. This entryway is decorated with a gold and blue geometric angular pattern and this is implied to signify East Clock Town. As such the sign having those same colors can be interpreted as drawing an identity connection to the area it's in.

There's also an element of rpg conventions; typically inns are places where the player can rest and restore health and is usually marked with symbols of rest or nighttime such as candles, beds, or in this case the moon.

And finally the inn itself was formerly a cafeteria (hence the name, Stock Pot) before the previous owner died and the current owners reopened as an inn, and yet any sign of it formerly being a cafeteria is absent from the sign, which communicates that the current owners don't want the current establishment to be associated with its previous incarnation.

From these we have our objectives and limitations: keep the blue and gold colors and don't include overt cooking imagery.

Project Start

Firstly I set up a moodboard with different screenshots and fanart of the game along with inn logos as well as bell-themed logos as I was fairly certain at this point that the logo would be bell-themed, both because of the bell landmark and also because it could be used as an inverted pot as a subtle callback to the inn's previous identity.

Afterwards I sketched thumbnails based around 4 general ideas: the location of the inn in east Clock Town, rpg inn elements, inverted kitchen imagery, and finally a set of ideas that seemed Wrong.

From this I selected the 3 ideas that felt the strongest and expanded them into rough logos. The first played off Clocktown's layout and is designed after a compass with the inn's bell signifying the inn and the name contained in the circle.

The second one is a bit more abstract, based on the design of the All Night mask which prevents you from sleeping and is needed to complete a quest in the inn.

The third followed along traditional rpg conventions and is in the form of a candleholder, the handle being the O for stock and pot and the candle itself being the I in Inn.

All of these are made in a blue and gold angular design to reflect the East Clock Town motif.

I decided ultimately to go with the all night mask design. From a purely in-universe perspective there's a fun bit of irony while also playing into local legends and folklore as well as the proclivity for masks, as well as a springboard for a tagline such as "refreshed like you didn't even need rest".

However there's also the gameplay aspect to consider as this is an area where the all night mask is needed to complete a quest. Even deeper, when considering that typically in rpgs inns are locations where the player can rest and restore health, sleeping is an activity that's not really possible or recommended in this game as the player has a 72-hour time limit to complete it before the moon crashes and destroys everything.

Furthermore all the quests involving the Stock Pot Inn rely on the player expressly not sleeping, making this inn an inversion of a standard rpg trope which this design reflects.

Roughs and Refining

I then began developing the logo itself. Because I wanted a pixelated style I turned on the grid in Illustrator to keep things as true to actual pixels as possible in a vector format. Before I drew the mask I wrote out the name on the pixel grid.

When I was making the mask itself it was recommended that I have the Inn portion contained to keep everything looking like one coherent piece, so I closed off the lower portion of the mask.

Next I arranged the words so the Os in Stock and Pot would line up with the eyes and found the different letter amounts threw off the balance quite a bit.

Most of this stage was tweaking the shape of the mask and the spacing between the letters and eyes to make it more balanced without throwing off the mask's symmetry.

Solution

Once I got the mask to a point I was happy with I applied the colors and made variations with the colors reversed and with only the type. I wanted a wide variety of designs that could be applied to items which one might reasonably expect to find in an inn as well as game merchandise.

Final Thoughts

I had so much fun with this project from beginning to end. I loved being able to use my knowledge of this game to make something like this and explore why design choices might have been made and what other choices could’ve been made. There’s something really special about design within the context of a fictional setting and trying to get into the mindset of people there.

I also had a lot of fun figuring out how to basically do a version of pixel art, it was a little tricky to figure out but well worth it and I can’t wait to see what I make in the future with this skill!