The app
Blazon
Design a coat of arms, by the old rules.
Heraldry is a design language nearly a thousand years old: a strict, elegant grammar of shields, colours and symbols. Blazon lets you actually speak it. Pick a shield shape, choose the field and how it's divided, lay an ordinary across it, then add charges — a rampant lion, an eagle, a fleur-de-lis, a tower, a scattering of stars — each placeable, scalable and paintable in any historic tincture.
- Shields
- Charges
- Blazon
It speaks back
The app writes what you drew
As you build, Blazon composes the formal blazon: the precise text a herald would use, in the proper order, so you watch the written language map onto the picture in front of you.
Azure, a lion rampant or
And back again
Not sure where to start? Randomise gives you something pleasing at once; undo and redo let you push it around. Name it, save it to your gallery, and each entry keeps its thumbnail beside its blazon. Everything is drawn crisply on the shield in real time, on a parchment or stone backdrop of your choosing.
Beyond making, there's learning
A searchable glossary
Dozens of heraldic terms explained in plain language, each with its own small drawn illustration.
How to read a blazon
A primer that finally makes those dense one-line descriptions decode themselves.
A showcase of arms
Original examples showing divisions, ordinaries and charges at work. Load any of them into the studio as a starting point.
Choose your backdrop, set a default shield, pick an accent, and create as much as you like — offline, with no account and no ads. Every charge is an original drawing, and the app never copies a real family's arms, so what you make is wholly your own.
Get Blazon on Google PlayPackage com.argentmark.blazon
Designing arms is not being granted them. What you make here is your own artwork, not a grant of arms and not a claim to any family's. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland arms are granted by the College of Arms; in Scotland they are matriculated by the Court of the Lord Lyon, where using arms that aren't yours is a legal matter rather than a matter of taste. Treat a design made in an app as a design, and don't reproduce an existing family's, town's or state's arms.
Working out
The rule of tincture, measured
Heralds have said for centuries: never put metal on metal, nor colour on colour. Gold and silver are the metals; gules, azure, sable, vert and purpure the colours. It sounds like etiquette. Put the tinctures through the standard relative-luminance contrast formula and it turns out to be optics.
Field
Charge
Every pair, by contrast
Green cells are the pairings heraldry allows; red ones are forbidden.
Across the twenty-one possible pairings of the seven tinctures, the ten that heraldry permits average a contrast ratio of 7.4 : 1; the eleven it forbids average 1.8 : 1. The separation is almost perfect: the weakest permitted pairing, gold on green, comes out at 3.89, and the strongest forbidden one, black on green, at 3.38.
Modern accessibility guidance asks for 3 : 1 between a graphic and its background. All ten permitted pairs clear it; nine of the eleven forbidden pairs fail it. A rule invented for a battlefield at distance and the rule written for screens in 2008 agree about which colours can sit on which.
What's not here: no studio, no charges, no divisions, no blazon text. This is one plain bend on a plain shield and a contrast calculation, with the furs left out entirely, since ermine and vair sit outside the metal-and-colour argument. Lions, towers, the glossary and the sentence a herald would actually write are all in the app.
On paper
FrostThorn Studio
- Company
- REPAPER ASSOCIATES & UK COMPANY LIMITED, trading as FrostThorn Studio
- Director
- Ping Tong Chan
- Address
- 33 West Cliff Mansions, 2 Hahnemann Road, Bournemouth BH2 5FB, United Kingdom
Spotted a term explained wrongly in the glossary, or a blazon the app composes in the wrong order? Send the design and what it should read. Heraldry is picky, and so are we.