Why copying heraldic symbols fails to generate real coats of arms

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

Ben Overmyer, creator of the Iron Arachne generator, argues that heraldry is not a symbol catalog but a rule system. Western blazon works like a constrained language: generate a structured description, then render it. Japanese mon are compositional, built by rotating and repeating graphical motifs. Randomly combining charges or flowers ignores the rules and exceptions—like the Kingdom of Jerusalem's gold-on-silver—that make designs authentic.