What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators

I spend a lot of time thinking about heraldry, but perhaps not in quite the same way that a heraldic historian does. For Iron Arachne, I have to think about heraldry as a system that can be represented in software. That changes the questions I ask. It’s easy enough to assemble a catalog of lions, eagles, crosses, swords, flowers, and crowns and randomly select from it †† This is pretty much what the very first version of the heraldry generator did. The heraldry generator is older than Iron Arachne itself, in fact, and none of the original code is part of the current site. ↩ . That can produce something that looks vaguely heraldic. It does not, however, reproduce heraldry. A heraldic tradition is not merely a collection of symbols. It’s a system of rules governing how those symbols are selected, described, arranged, combined, distinguished, and recognized. That raises a more interesting problem for procedural generation: how can I represent those systems programmatically while…