How a plate is made

Plenty of sites will sell you «your family coat of arms». Most do the same thing: take any crest from a catalogue and print your surname underneath. Not here, and this page sets out exactly what we do so you can judge it.

1. The blazon is the data. The drawing comes after

A blazon is the description of a coat of arms in the technical language of heraldry: «Gules, three castles argent». That text is not an approximate description of a picture: it is the definition. Two artists reading the same blazon draw recognisably the same arms, and neither can add anything the text does not say.

Our corpus is 107,767 blazons taken from published heraldic sources: Rietstap's Armorial Général (1884), works of Spanish heraldry and manuscripts cited one by one. We wrote none of them.

2. The drawing is made by a program, not an illustrator

Our own engine reads the blazon word by word and builds the shield: divisions, tinctures, ordinaries and charges, each in its place and following the rules of heraldry — starting with the one that forbids metal on metal and colour on colour. The result is a vector file, not an image: which is why it prints as well at A3 as at A0.

3. And here is the part almost nobody tells you

Our reader does not understand every blazon. Of the 107,767 it fully understands 36%. It gets most of the rest, but not all, and a half-read blazon produces a perfectly attractive and wrong shield: the text says «ten bezants or» and the drawing has one.

So we only sell the ones that are read in full. The rest we show — with a notice — but do not charge for. A misread coat of arms hanging on a wall cannot be corrected.

There is a second reason we hold some back: part of the charge artwork we use comes from libraries licensed for non-commercial use only. We are replacing them with our own drawings, one at a time. Until a figure is redrawn, the arms that use it can be looked at but not bought.

Between the two, 26,519 surnames are on sale today. That is far fewer than we could advertise, and it is the only number we can defend.

4. What a surname coat of arms is not

A surname does not grant a right to arms. Arms were granted to a person and pass to their descendants; sharing a surname with them makes nobody the bearer. What you buy is the representation of a blazon documented against that surname in a heraldic source, with the source cited on the plate. That is what it is, and it is plenty.

5. If something looks wrong

Write to pedidos@blasonia.com. If the arms do not match the blazon, that is our mistake and we fix it: we refund you and we correct the reader for everyone.