What Heraldry and Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators
3 hours ago
- Heraldry can be represented as a generative system with a formal language (blazon) describing designs, making it suitable for procedural generation.
- Japanese mon (kamon) lack a direct equivalent to blazon and rely on geometric composition, such as repeating and rotating motifs.
- Generating heraldic designs requires modeling rules and relationships, not just selecting symbols from a catalog.
- The 'rule of tincture' and other conventions constrain choices; conditional generation better respects historical heraldic systems.
- Historical exceptions (e.g., Kingdom of Jerusalem's metal-on-metal arms) show rules are conventions, not immutable laws.
- A distinction between grammar (normal operations) and corpus (historical examples) helps handle irregularities in generation.
- The bigger lesson: procedural generation should focus on operations (division, repetition, rotation) rather than a static list of objects.
- Future work includes applying these insights to other visual identity systems like tartans, flags, and writing systems.