Storm Skyline Painted

Painted plates are the middle ground and the most forgiving. Colour is already exaggerated, so pushing the palette to a saturated accent does not look like a filter, and the tonal range is deliberately wide, which gives the wordmark a bright band to sit against and a dark corner to shadow into.

They compress better than photoreal for animated formats. Broad areas of related colour are exactly what a 160-colour GIF palette handles well, so a painted scene at 7MB looks closer to its source than a photographic one at the same budget.

Choose painted when the server has no strong tonal identity yet. It is the style least likely to be wrong in a year.

See every painted design.

The most dramatic family here, built on a single bright opening in an otherwise heavy sky. That opening is where the lockup goes, which means the composition is doing the work of pointing at your server name. The trade is that it only works with the lockup in the position the plate expects, so this family has the least layout freedom.

The same scene is also drawn in anime, grunge and photoreal.

Blue is the most common accent in roleplay branding, which cuts both ways: it signals competence and it does not stand out. Where it genuinely helps is the emergency-services and law-enforcement side of a server, where blue is already the colour of the thing being depicted. Keep it saturated; a muted slate blue is one of the colours that disappears into Discord's sidebar.

See every blue design.