When armours, shields & weapons are crafted, they should be able to have their appearance changed once by its creator for automatic success to represent that the crafter can design an item to look like anything he/she wants it to look like.
As a weapon smith it annoys me that I can hammer out a blade (maybe even at a trivial success rate) and then not be able to have the blade look how i want it too. Diversity is after all the spice of life and far too many people walk around with identical longswords as iff they had all been stamped out in the same factory using mass production moulds!
The other option here would be allow crafters to make items by their design. Put a sword or piece of armour in a design copier, with some cloth, and the device gives you 'patterns' that can then be used on a sword, piece of armour etc to sett the current items appearance to that of the pattern. it would mean that guilds could have guild style for the items etc they produce.
