Making Heraldic Design More Approachable

Designing a coat of arms is surprisingly difficult.

Traditional heraldry offers a rich collection of symbols, colours, and rules, but most existing resources assume that you already understand the terminology. General-purpose design software provides more freedom, but creating everything from scratch takes time and design experience.

I wanted to make the process more approachable: start with visual choices, experiment freely, and see the result immediately—without needing to learn complicated software first.

That led me to build Coat of Arms Maker, a tool for exploring and creating coat-of-arms designs directly in the browser.

It’s still evolving, and I’d be interested to hear which parts of the process people find difficult or confusing.