An anomaly logo isn't just a picture on a t-shirt. It's the first visible sign that a city has been picked, it's what agents use as a profile picture for six months, it's what they look at when they arrive on the playbox. So no, we didn't rush it.
Here's how we went from a rough sketch to the crest you wore on 22 August.
1. The shape, right away
The silhouette came almost immediately, and it never changed after that: half a Resistance key blending into half of the Eiffel Tower.
The idea fits in one sentence: the Eiffel Tower is the symbol of Paris the whole world recognises, and its lattice structure sits beautifully inside Ingress's visual vocabulary. Cut vertically, it leaves room for the other half of the drawing — the key, our faction logo. Two silhouettes, one object.
Proof that it was the obvious answer: the ENL landed on a very similar principle on their side. When two teams who don't talk to each other reach the same idea, it usually means the idea was right.
This first version is entirely monochrome, a deep navy blue on a light background. The whole drawing is built from lattice work — the cross-bracing that echoes the Tower's iron girders, applied to the key just as much as to the tower itself. No colour, no effects: just structure.
2. Trying it on
The next versions explore the layout rather than the drawing itself: gradient background, map of France, placement of the "2026", a white-on-navy inversion with the Eiffel Tower watermarked inside the crest. We were working out how the crest behaves on dark fabric, on light fabric, at small sizes, in embroidery.
The drawing itself doesn't move. What moves is everything around it.
3. Colour arrives — and one deliberate choice
Switching to a low-poly style, built from triangular facets, breaks the stiffness of the lattice and gives the whole thing depth. All blue at first, then with the Eiffel Tower half turning red.
That red does two things at once, which is exactly why we kept it:
- It evokes Machina. The third force, the one that belongs to nobody, the one eating away at the world through its links.
- It gives the logo the colours of Paris: blue and red, the colours of the city's coat of arms, the ones you find on every official building here.
And there was a decision behind that choice, so here it is, plainly: we didn't want the ENL evoked anywhere, not even through a colour. No green in this logo. The opposition doesn't exist on our crest. Machina red solved that neatly, while being entirely legitimate for Paris.
4. Making the texture mean something
This is the most interesting stage, and the one you see least in the final result: we stopped drawing decorative patterns and started drawing the game.
The red side first. The lines no longer follow a grid: they radiate from a single point, in fans of uneven length, never crossing each other — because that's how links work in Ingress. One portal, links spreading out like a star, then the next portal starting over somewhere else. That's exactly what a Machina-infected area looks like on the Intel map: stars propagating from one node to the next, with no readable plan behind them. The directions and lengths are random, on purpose. This work-in-progress screenshot is the moment we were hunting for the right density.
Then the blue side. The early versions show very regular fields, with the portal nodes clearly marked — too clean, honestly. So we made those irregular too: uneven triangles, varying sizes, overlaps. Like a real field cluster built on the ground, with portals where they actually are rather than where you'd like them to be.
At that point the logo says something: our fields on one side, Machina's links on the other.
5. Strip it back, then sign it
The last stage is the thankless one: taking things away. The portal nodes become redundant once the structure reads clearly, the flat areas are simplified, the contrast is pushed so the crest holds up at three centimetres on a lanyard and at three metres on a flag.
One detail, if you look closely: the border between the two halves isn't a straight line. The blue fields bite into Machina's territory, they spill over, they take ground. Nothing accidental about it — it's the one thing the logo really asserts: humans are fighting the machine, and humans are winning.
And finally the anomaly series name goes in: APOLLO, running vertically along the right edge, with both "O"s in red — two portals, in Machina red, as if the infection had crept all the way into the name of the series.
What's left
A crest that says, in a single image: Paris, Resistance, Apollo, 2026, and Machina is out there. Without a word of explanation, and without a single concession to the opposition.
On 22 August, it flew on around fifty team flags. Paris is blue.
This logo is the work of @Cordatus, @Egreeter, @Rozeberry and @nimbusparis — weeks of back and forth, abandoned versions and details nobody will ever notice. Which is exactly right: a good crest is one you wear without wondering how it was made.
#yestoparis #pariswillbeblue