Algorithmic Heraldry

A personal research project, with no brief and no deadline. It started from an identity designer's hunch: long before brand guidelines, medieval Europe had already invented a complete system to sign people, families and cities. Heraldry.

A coat of arms wasn't passed on as a drawing but as a text, the blazon, precise enough for a herald to redraw a shield he had never seen. A visual identity written as a program, in other words. What happens to that system if you take it literally, and actually hand it to a machine to run?

Reading first: Neubecker's treatises, and the tables in which Pietrasanta fixed, in the 17th century, the hatchings that stand for colours in print. Then translating each rule into a function: shield shape, partition, charge, motto.

A first colour version was dropped. Black and white held up better in print, hit harder, and above all freed the hatchings from their coded meaning: they no longer stand for a colour, they become a material.

Six shield shapes, fifteen geometric partitions, twenty-three Latin mottoes and a repertoire of old and contemporary charges, cut through by hatched patterns limited to four angles. Over twenty trillion combinations.

Each coat of arms is sealed by a short key that acts as a seed: the same key always gives back the same image, and that image can only come from it.

Absolute black and white. No grey, no gradient: the shield reads like a stamp, at any size.

A key rather than a file. What is stored is not the image but the way to make it. A sort of medieval QR code.

A book that lays itself out. A Python script sets all 500 pages: spreads follow each other at random, with one constraint, recto and verso share the same ground.

A stance on AI. A system where every rule is known and every image can be reproduced exactly. The designer no longer draws the final image, but remains the author of everything it produces.

Five hundred pages, in French and English, between A4 and A5, with a Swiss open-spine binding. The book opens on a thirteen-chapter essay, runs through the coats of arms, from grids of a hundred shields to a single shield, and closes on the index of keys. A printed dummy was used to fine-tune the object.

The generator can be played below: enter a key, get its coat of arms.

Shown on Instagram, the project mostly triggered an unexpected demand: people asking for their own coat of arms, and their key. The book is finished and unpublished; submission to publishers is underway.