How it works
A badge here is what the last decade of club rebrands settled on: one silhouette, two or three colours, a field that is plain or cut once, and one big emblem doing all the talking. The emblems are families rather than pictures — a ball, a crown, a tower, an anchor, keys, a sun, a bolt, a ship, a tree, and four abstract marks — and the seed turns each one’s own knobs: three points on the crown or five, one tower or a castle of three, a single key or two crossed. Each is sized to the largest it can be inside the badge, tried at a handful of heights, because the roomiest place in a shield is not its middle.
An emblem has holes — a gate in a tower, the jewels in a crown, the hexagons of a ball — and the drawing can’t make any. So a hole is a second shape painted over the first in the colour of whatever is behind it, and the emblem is drawn over the field cell by cell so that colour is always known. The same pass is what counterchanges an emblem across a split field, dark over light and light over dark, which is the most modern thing a two-colour crest can do. Across anything busier than one straight cut it would chop the emblem into pieces, so there it keeps a single colour instead; over stripes and hoops it gets a plate to stand on.
Colours are dealt by contrast rather than in order, which is heraldry’s rule of tincture with a number in it: the body stands off the paper, the second colour off the first, and anything laid across both off each. Everything is a polygon cut to the silhouette rather than painted and masked back, so the print file is a few dozen closed paths that were already the right shape when they were drawn.