Background

Chinese chess is a lot easer to get into for non-Chinese people if a horse looks like ♞/♘ rather than 馬/傌, for the first few games. Publicly available piece set graphics seem to all have one or more of the following shortcomings:

• Raster but vector images
• Unclear or troublesome licensing
• Poor aesthetics ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6])
• Lack of elephant, cannon/catapult, advisor pieces

Goal

Simplified, what I am looking for is

• a sexy replacement to the western pieces shown at Wikipedia,
• in true SVG format,
• suitable for black-and-white print.

The resulting graphics will be published with CC0 Public Domain Dedication licensing (or Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY) if you prefer) for use to everyone. Particular use cases are use with xiangqi- setup, XBoard/WinBoard, Wikipedia, future books (by others) and stickers for Chinese chess hardware.

In more detail

• Seven pieces per party: chariot/rook, horse, elephant, advisor, king, cannon/catapult, pawn/soldier
• Use black "ink" only: Black pieces should be all black with parts cut out, "white"/"red" pieces should be black outlines with body cut out (example here)
• No two pieces should be hard to distinguish, in particular not:
  • Pawns/soldiers, advisors and king
  • Elephants and horses
  • Cannons and chariots
• Advisors should not look similar to queens in western chess
• Flat 2D is fine. If some pieces imitate 3D, all of them should (so no flat and pseudo 3D in the same set, please)
• Needs to work at small sizes. So either two sets for small and regular display or one set that works at any size.
• Pieces should not have a circle for a background (unlike this)
• Not too arty, not too fancy, specific rather than abstract. Clean and simple but appealing, please.
• Chinese culture elements welcome, if you know how to use them well.

Are you interested in working on this project? Please get in touch!