• By MuggleNet Editorial Staff
• 31 Aug, 2026
• Back to Hogwarts

Hogwarts is getting a new visual identity for HBO’s Harry Potter series, and we finally have our clearest look yet at how the four houses will be represented inside the castle.

A video from HBO taken at the Harry Potter Owl Post Experience in Sydney, Australia, has revealed all four new Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw designs together. The activation, created by HBO Max and Australia Post as part of this year’s Back to Hogwarts celebrations, took over the historic Sydney GPO at Martin Place on August 29 and 30. 

Parts of the new house designs had already appeared in HBO’s behind-the-scenes special Finding Harry: The Craft Behind the Magic. In particular, viewers caught glimpses of the Ravenclaw and Slytherin banners hanging at Hogwarts. The official Harry Potter website even called attention to their redesigned animals and the vine motifs surrounding them. 

But the Sydney display gives us something the documentary did not: a clear look at all four.

And there is quite a lot going on here. You can check out the video for yourself here:

Crests, Emblems, or Something Else?

First, a little terminology, because we went down the heraldry rabbit hole so you don’t have to.

Calling these the Hogwarts house crests is understandable. The Harry Potter franchise itself has regularly used that term for house artwork over the years. But technically, a crest is only one particular part of a full coat of arms, specifically the object placed above the helmet. The College of Arms notes that using “crest” to describe an entire heraldic design is a common misconception. 

House emblems is probably the better description for the HBO designs, and conveniently, that is also the terminology the official Harry Potter site used when discussing them after Finding Harry. 

The familiar movie-era versions are built around shields, helmets, elaborate mantling, and animals contained within the shield. Those ingredients deliberately evoke the visual language of medieval European heraldry. A traditional armorial display could include the central shield, a helmet, a crest above it, and additional ornamentation around the whole composition. 

For HBO’s version, however, each house animal sits inside a circular medallion, surrounded by botanical decoration, with the house name across a ribbon. They look more like institutional badges, seals, or decorative banners that might be hanging throughout an old school.

Hogwarts Heraldry Gets a More Natural Look

The new Gryffindor emblem features a gold lion rearing against its familiar red background. Slytherin’s snake has become a long, elegant serpent curling through the center of a muted green medallion. Hufflepuff gets a full-bodied badger standing upright against yellow, while Ravenclaw is represented by a golden eagle (!!!) against a dark blue background.

All four are bordered by branches, leaves, or vines, but the foliage is slightly different from house to house rather than being copied wholesale across the set.

One of the design principles established in Finding Harry was that the production is rooting its version of magic in the natural world. HBO’s designers have worked leaves, vines, trees, natural materials, and organic shapes into everything from Hogwarts interiors to costumes and packaging. The official Harry Potter site specifically identified the vines on the new house banners as another extension of that idea. 

Seen clearly now, the effect is much stronger. These look as though they belong to the same decorative system, something that could plausibly have been embroidered into banners or painted around Hogwarts hundreds of years ago.

There is still plenty of heraldry in their DNA. Medieval heraldic art relied heavily on easily recognizable animals and bold blocks of color, with animals and other objects known as “charges” rendered in deliberately stylized forms. Lions and eagles, in particular, have extraordinarily long histories in European armorial imagery. 

Ravenclaw Finally Looks Like Ravenclaw

For book readers, one emblem is likely to attract more attention than the others:

Ravenclaw has an eagle!!!

The books establish Ravenclaw’s animal as an eagle and its colors as blue and bronze. The official Harry Potter encyclopedia continues to describe the house that way, including the bronze eagle-shaped knocker at the entrance to the Ravenclaw common room. 

The films famously departed from that combination, most noticeably by using a raven in much of the movie-era Ravenclaw branding and shifting the house toward blue and silver.

The HBO design goes emphatically in the other direction. The bird is unmistakably eagle-like, while its warm metallic coloring brings bronze back into the visual identity. The background appears extremely dark blue, bordering on violet in the Sydney footage, although we would hesitate to judge exact color values until HBO releases the artwork digitally. Probably just the lighting.

The House Symbols Have Never Really Been Set in Stone

It is also worth remembering that there has never been only one “correct” visual version of a Hogwarts house emblem.

Different publishers and artists have interpreted the houses repeatedly. Mary GrandPré created her own versions for Scholastic, while Bloomsbury commissioned illustrator Levi Pinfold to develop elaborate new house crests for its 20th-anniversary House Editions. Those designs went much further into traditional heraldic symbolism, incorporating additional objects, plants, animals, and colors intended to represent qualities associated with each house. 

The animals themselves, however, have remained the anchors: Gryffindor’s lion, Slytherin’s serpent, Hufflepuff’s badger, and Ravenclaw’s eagle. The official house descriptions still pair them with scarlet and gold, green and silver, yellow and black, and blue and bronze respectively. 

These new versions are another glimpse of a new version of Hogwarts that increasingly seems determined to ask what a thousand-year-old magical school might have developed for itself.

And yes, Ravenclaws, we’re just as thrilled about the eagle as you are!