What heraldry and Japanese mon can teach about visual-identity generators (benovermyer.com)

Reminds me of Urbit sigils. They had a really cool system for generating unique visual identities. The write up is one of my favorite design/tech articles:

https://urbit.org/blog/creating-sigils.

> Visual-Identity Generators

This makes me think of user-avatar scenarios, like systems that automatically make an abstract design linked to an anonymous user's IP.

If the possibility space is big enough, old heraldry rules could be applied the same way—though old families might not appreciate seeing "their" design randomly appropriated.

Quick visual on some mon:

https://mon.xavid.us/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_(emblem)

There was a really cool project a few years ago from Area Tech that explored this - generative shields (with heraldry on them). https://shields.build/

I love this for several reasons:

1. LLMs building tools that can be run by either LLMs or humans are a great idea

2. Generative art sometimes feels like "art by machine" but humans create art and logos in very similar ways e.g. start with "the rules" and then use that to create the art

Also, someone generally pops up in these discussions about "how this is not being creative" etc. To that I point people to the Everything Is A Remix series:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc (2016)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA (updated for 2023)

Here's an idea that I've retrained for the longest but never acted on:

Give people a survey, to identify movies, books, etc. they like. Then summarize all this into a visual symbol. Then you can print this on a t-shirt on a laptop sticker, etc. Humans get the general areas you like but it's machine readable, too - take a photo and you get all the details that he person chose to share!

Thoughts?

Tangent, but I deeply appreciate the treatment of footnotes on this article, just floating alongside the text in the right gutter instead of at the bottom of the article. It seems so obvious (at least on desktop) but I haven't seen it before. It's so nice to be able to see whether it's something I want to read, or just a citation, without clicking and losing my place (yes, I know there's usually a link back to the article flow, but especially in the "sticky header" era we've been in for decades, that rarely works well).

Can we all agree to system prompt Claude and open models to stop using the same exact Fraunces font everywhere (The Capital J looks like someone folded it backwards). I said open models because qwen and Glm and Claude produce the same design and font for the same “design a gorgeous website” prompt.