What Heraldry and 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. 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.
- ▪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.
- ▪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.
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| Original publisher | Ben Overmyer |
| Canonical URL | https://benovermyer.com/blog/2026/09/japanese-vs-western-heraldry/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:48:44 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-28T15:27:23.499Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-28T15:27:23.499Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | VQHAEM1aHYnw · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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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.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ben Overmyer.
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