So a Hot Drop artifact will be pyramid-shaped, a Loot Expander would be cubical and so on.
The appearance of the artifact orbital visual effects is, instead, dictated by the element of the special effect. A Spark Plug will have a blue light ring spinning around it, an Elemental Projector will have this rainbow one:
And so on and so forth.
Well then, how do these attachments affect artifacts?
The Pearl is a melee artifact. The Banjo has a red glow to it but it is shock. I dunno. It seems to have a theme, then seems to have exceptions to that theme.
I’m not sure about the Electric Banjo, but I think they might have chosen that model for the Pearl simply because it was the most pearl-like out of all the artifact shapes.
Anyway yeah, I agree that red text items often don’t seem to be forced to follow pre-set loot rules.
I would love to see a better way of telling the artifacts apart. They all have similar scores, but do completely different things. Looking at a couple of dozen of them and trying to sort them out does my head in. I would love to see a much greater visual difference in them to make it easier to sort them out.